


Sparks Fly Upwards

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: My Family (And Other Dinosaurs) [41]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Coming of Age, F/F, F/M, Kidnapping, M/M, Prehistoric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:45:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 95,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3270455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helen Cutter has had plans for Lester's daughter for a very long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I first came up with this epic about five years ago, and actually wrote it in a burst of unaccustomed willpower the summer before last. Extravagant thanks are owed to Luka, for beta-ing the damn thing, and to Fred, Fifi, Bella, Reggie and many others for lending me their OCs, cheerleading, and listening to me wailing on when it seemed like it would never be finished. The title is Biblical, from, I believe, the Book of Job. Suffice to say that Liz Lester has never been, and never will be, capable of keeping out of trouble. I owe a tremendous debt to all those involved in the Denial Creature of the Month and Era of the Month posts, which I drew on shamelessly, as well as to Annariel, whose piece on the contents of Helen’s backpack was absolutely invaluable, and to various friends and family who put up with my odd questions. Any remaining errors, of course, are mine.
> 
> Readers who are not familiar with my Liz writing should be able to read this as a straightforward adventure story in the knowledge that Liz is James Lester’s oldest child and only daughter. Anyone familiar with my Liz writing may be interested to go back and re-read On Salisbury Plain. The really horrifically keen may also wish to remind themselves of Endgame and What’s In A Name? Other mini-references to other pieces of my writing may pop out at those with improbably good memories.
> 
>  
> 
> Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.

            Juliet Sayers was accustomed to early hours and strenuous exercise, and – thanks to a serendipitous combination of inclination and habit – actively enjoyed both. She hated to be woken before she was ready, but she was still bright, cheerful and raring to go even at six-thirty in the morning if that was when she had chosen to get up. Today she had chosen to get up at seven o’clock and go running in Battersea Park with her girlfriend, so she was wide awake and happy to be so, especially because she knew instinctively that she needed to spend time with Liz on Liz’s terms for their relationship to keep working. They’d been together for the best part of two years, with very few arguments, a tendency to compromise and deep reserves of trust between them. At one point, when she’d lost her adored younger brother, Liz had come close to breaking and had relied heavily on Juliet to put herself back together again. Liz was as prepared as Juliet was to work to keep their relationship functioning, and determined to put Juliet before herself, so it wasn’t as if Juliet was alone in trying to make sure that her faint stirrings of unease never became reality.

 

            Still. Juliet was seventeen and Liz sixteen, and Juliet’s physically and mentally demanding place at the Royal Ballet School – a boarding school – combined with Liz’s increasing commitment to the CCF put them in a difficult position, with much less time or energy to spend on each other than they’d had before. Juliet wasn’t just getting up at seven o’clock on a delightfully sunny Sunday morning to keep her relationship with her girlfriend intact. There was an irritating itch under her skin, a nagging tug that told her that two weeks without more than texts and calls from Liz was too long, and that she needed to know Liz was in the same room rather than on the other side of London for a change. Being largely a creature of habit and ingrained practice, she was used to having Liz close by most of the time, and found she disliked it when Liz wasn’t. Juliet didn’t want to be clingy, but she was sick of watching her friends date and snog and break up without being able to turn to Liz for a hug or a kiss or – Jesus _Christ_ , just to hold _hands_.

 

            Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Juliet snorted to herself as she jumped off the bus and crossed the road, passing through the open iron gates of Battersea Park, anticipation fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

 

            Liz lived closer to Battersea Park, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes’ walk away in one of the tall modern glass blocks of flats that lined the Thames. She was also hell-bent on a different kind of fitness to Juliet’s, one that relied less on hours at the barre and more on hours of demanding physical activity outdoors; she disliked gyms and barely tolerated the fact that her judo lessons were indoors. Juliet knew quite well that Liz would have been in the park for at least half an hour, running one of the circuits they frequented, and if she started jogging she would either catch up with her or collide with her soon enough. There was no particular hurry.

 

            Juliet stopped and stretched thoroughly, admiring the bright blue of the sky and the cotton wool-like fluffy clouds contrasted against the green leaves and wide expanses of grass that characterised the park. Then she turned on the iPod strapped to her arm, chose a route, and started to jog.

 

            Slowly, it became apparent that all was not as it should have been. Liz did not turn up on the route Juliet had chosen, a particular favourite Liz had explicitly said she would run – and even if she’d changed her mind, which she might have done, it was out of character for Liz not to meet her there anyway. Juliet slowed to a walk and redid her ponytail, forcing masses of blonde hair to submit to her will and wondering where Liz could possibly have got to.

 

            She took her phone from a pocket and called Liz. The call rang out with no answer.

 

            “Hi, you’ve reached Liz Lester. Unless you’re my mother, please leave a message aft-”

 

            Juliet cut the call and stared at the screen of her phone as if she thought it might enlighten her, which it didn’t. Bad enough that Liz wasn’t where she ought to be; significantly worse that she wasn’t answering her phone.

 

            Juliet put the phone back into her pocket, half-hoping that it would light up and buzz as Liz called her back, and uneasily asked herself if Liz could have got hurt.

 

            Liz was not clumsy or injury-prone. She knew the park well enough that any hazards wouldn’t be unexpected. She was also tall by her family’s standards – perhaps five foot eight and still growing – and strong by anyone’s standards, and a ruthless fighter taught more than a sixteen-year-old should really know by Lyle and a few of his friends. Juliet would honestly have been very surprised if a mugger had settled on her as easy prey. She would have been even more surprised if Liz had given up her iPod, phone or anything else she might have on her, although it would have explained why she hadn’t answered her phone. Unless knocked unconscious, she would not have let her phone ring out on a call from Juliet.

 

            Juliet had stopped dead beside the smaller children’s playground, thinking. She now started to walk again, picking up momentum and speed as she moved until she was back to jogging. There were smaller, quieter paths close by that Liz might have chosen as a diversion to the usual route, and it was possible Liz was on one of those. She plunged into the darker dappled light of one of these, ears and eyes straining to catch some sight of Liz. She had to be around here somewhere, Juliet told herself. She must just have left her phone at home. If Juliet just _looked_...

 

            It was because she was so preoccupied that, five minutes later, she trod on an open Swiss Army knife and slipped, falling to her hands and knees in what she quickly recognised as splotches of dried blood.

 

            Juliet was far from stupid. She was one small teenager alone in an isolated spot and without the person she trusted most to protect her. Her scream choked itself in her throat, and the strangled noise that did escape was too quiet and mangled to catch anyone’s attention. She bounced onto her feet, stared around until she was sure no-one was hiding behind a bush, and then paused to pick up the object that had led her to fall in the first place and examine the evidence on the ground.

 

            Yes, she was standing in blood. Yes, it was recent, clotted but not completely dried in the shade of the greenery surrounding the path (she scrubbed ineffectively at the residue on her black jogging trousers). Yes, it had probably been inflicted by the Swiss Army knife she held, the open blade of which was covered in rust-red blood, and which was chillingly familiar. Heart thumping, cold adrenaline racing through her system, Juliet turned it over, hoping against hope that it wasn’t the one Liz had been given aged thirteen and which she carried when she could remember where it was, and found three letters engraved on one side that cut her hopes to pieces. EAL: Elizabeth Alison Lester.

 

            In other words, Liz.

 

            Juliet’s self-control was formidable, but not formidable enough, and a comfortable and comforting life in a reasonably civilised area of London could never have reinforced it with sufficient fear to stop her screaming for Liz. She didn’t even do it consciously, but as the echoes of her shout burst through Battersea Park, startling the pigeons and parakeets from their trees, she realised that if Liz’s captors were around she’d just put herself in terrible danger and reacted on better instincts. She sobbed in panic, stuffed the knife into her pocket beside her phone, and sprinted for open grass and safety, feet sure, heart hammering and eyes wild.

 

            By the time she broke free into the public car park, with no sounds or signs of pursuit, she felt a little calmer – still petrified for Liz, but more certain of her own safety and more rational. She reached into her pocket and closed the knife, which she’d pushed into her pocket with the blade still open. Then she checked that the blood on her knees wasn’t visible, wiped her fingers on the inside of that pocket, wiped her feet and hands with their traces of dried blood on the grass, and took out her phone to call Liz’s home phone number. Instinct or chance had brought her to the exit closest to Liz’s home, and as she dialled the number, she walked towards it.

 

            Unlike Liz or Juliet, neither Lester nor Lyle was particularly fond of early mornings, particularly when they could be spent with each other, in bed. Juliet was perfectly well aware of this. She was also perfectly well aware that it was almost nine o’clock, and that if she called enough times, Lyle at least would wake, stagger out of bed, and swear down the phone at her for a few minutes before developing the presence of mind to actually talk to her.  On the off-chance that neither of them picked up the phone, she could be at Liz’s front door in ten minutes, and they’d find her breaking the door down much harder to ignore.

 

            In the event, Lyle picked up the phone just as Juliet was walking through the entrance of the block of flats and calling the lift. The foul-tempered concierge, Miss Monterey, wasn’t there to stop her or ask what she was doing, and Juliet patiently waited out Lyle’s profanities as she got into the lift and punched the button for the sixth floor unnecessarily hard.

 

            “It’s me, Juliet,” she said when he’d stopped cursing her family unto the fourth generation (via several animals, a turkey baster, and a pile of horse manure). “Something’s happened to Liz. I’m in the lift coming up.”

 

            This produced absolute silence on the other end of the phone.

 

            “ _Fuck_ ,” Lyle said harshly, and ended the call.

 

            “Too right,” Juliet said conversationally to her dishevelled reflection in the lift’s mirror, and got out of the lift and headed down the corridor to the Lesters’ open front door. 

 

 

            Lyle met her on the other side, shirtless but sharp-eyed, and slammed the door shut behind her. Lester bore similar marks of a hasty awakening; however, he was mostly dressed and clinging to a cup of coffee like a lifeboat in a storm, lips pale and tight with anxiety.

 

            “Look,” Juliet said, before either of them could say anything to her, and took out Liz’s penknife. She dropped it on the breakfast bar, engraved initials facing up. “I found it on the path, open, in a pool of dried blood, maybe... half an hour ago, now? Liz wasn’t answering her phone and she wasn’t on the path where she said I’d meet her. I literally tripped over this.” She displayed her bloodied knees.

 

            Lyle let forth a stream of invective, and Lester went paler still.

 

            “Who?” Lester said harshly, but not to Juliet.

 

            “Fuck knows,” Lyle answered, equally harshly. “She may still be in the park itself.”

 

            “I called out,” Juliet admitted, dragging both men’s eyes back to her. She was shaking now, and couldn’t stop herself. “When I found the knife. She didn’t answer.”

 

            Lyle stood frozen for a second, then swore some more and left the kitchen at speed to dress properly.

 

            “If she was conscious, she would have answered you,” Lester said heavily.

 

            “That’s not what I wanted you to tell me,” Juliet whispered, voice small with fear, and climbed onto a stool at the breakfast bar to sit there, sweaty, mussed and scared, as Lyle came back out of the bedroom properly dressed and snapping instructions and information into his mobile phone.

 

            “- last seen at midnight last night, but I heard her leave the flat at seven-thirty this morning. Somewhere in Battersea Park. Her girlfriend. I don’t fucking know – James, is this official?”

 

            Lester nodded sharply. “There’s no other reason why someone would have taken her. At least, not someone she’d have tried to fight with a _penknife_.” He reached out and nudged the bloodstained little thing, and it revolved half a turn on the glossy counter. Juliet watched it, blue eyes wide, and felt herself shivering. So cold, and she couldn’t make herself warm again. She rubbed her hands together fruitlessly.

 

            “-yes it is, drag out whoever’s on duty at the ARC. Juliet, get off that stool before you fucking well fall off it.” Lyle vanished heedlessly into Liz’s bedroom and reappeared with one of Liz’s endless supply of hoodies – this one an old one, several years old and too small for Liz, but just right for Juliet. He flung it at her where she now sat cross-legged on the floor, legs refusing to hold her. She caught it and pulled it on, and almost sobbed with the faint, familiar scent of the fabric softener Liz used, and the feel of the thick, grey-faded black cotton against her too-cold skin.  Lester stuffed a cup of coffee and a croissant into her hands; she sipped at one and took large, crumbling bites of the other.

 

            “... Juliet knows where.” Lyle turned his attention back to her. “Juliet, where you found Liz’s knife. Could you find it again?”

 

            She nodded at once.

 

            “Now think.” There was a spark of kindness at the back of Lyle’s hard hazel eyes. “Could you go there again?”

 

            “Yes,” Juliet said, censoring various exclamations along the lines of ‘of course I fucking well could’, ‘for _Liz_ ’, and ‘are you crazy?’

 

            Lyle nodded, and went back to talking down the phone. At last, he ended his call, and slumped against the breakfast bar. “The lads’ll be here in forty-five minutes and we can search the park. The police-”

 

            “We’re not calling the police,” Lester said, and Juliet froze in her seat on the floor. She couldn’t see Lester, but she knew that pained note in his voice from the previous year, from Jamie’s death. “Not until we know if Liz is alive or not.”

 

            Juliet’s half-eaten croissant crumbled into a twisted pastry rope in her fist, and her coffee slopped in the mug, but was not spilt. Lyle looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “James. Problem,” he said.

 

            “Problem?” Lester said, tone questioning.

 

            Lyle jerked his head at Juliet, sitting on the floor and sandwiched between the breakfast bar and a sofa, therefore invisible from Lester’s angle. “Official, remember?”

 

            “Ah,” Lester murmured, and moved so that he could see Juliet and Juliet could see him.

 

            In her trainers, her toes curled, and her hands stayed harmless only because they were too busy to turn to fists. She said nothing, and waited them out.

 

            “How much do you know about what I do?” Lester asked.

 

            Juliet thought of long nights Liz spent on her own, nightmares overheard from the safety of Liz’s bed, and (most painfully of all) an hour or two long years previously when Juliet and a group of people she’d barely counted as acquaintances, let alone friends, had been hunted by something that belonged either in a zoo or a monster movie. Jenny Lewis, who insisted it was a lizard, was very persuasive and reassuringly sane; Ed Mackenzie, who insisted it was a dinosaur, was neither of those things. Juliet chose to hedge her bets and say that she didn’t know what it was and didn’t want to know – but that it definitely wasn’t a common-or-garden lizard.

 

            “Not much,” she said, meeting Lester’s eyes. “And I think that might be too much.”

 

            Lyle grinned. 

 

***

 

            The group that assembled in the underground parking lot of Lester’s block of flats was a small and ill-assorted group, all dressed in civvies, most wearing them uneasily. The ARC now contained only a skeleton guard; four of the soldiers on duty, including Lacey, who was quite attached to Liz, had come with a small arsenal in the back of one of the ARC’s official Jeeps and a wary eye. Joel Stringer had prised himself and Juliet’s mother out of the comfort of Emily Sayers’ bedroom, and Emily had gone upstairs to keep Lester company while Stringer joined in the search for Lester’s missing daughter. Connor Temple had spent the night nursing the ADD through one of its irregular tantrums, and had piled into the official Jeep at the last minute carrying his latest upgrade on the handheld anomaly detector, a sheaf of printouts, and a solemn frown that sat oddly on his boyish face. Jenny Lewis had been woken and apprised of the emergency, and was on her way to Lester’s flat, which was rapidly becoming a command post, but her field wasn’t searching for missing teenagers in large public parks and, while they might need to call on her to smooth any ruffled feathers, they didn’t need her to track Liz through Battersea Park. The mood was sombre, with little talking; Ditzy, the highest-ranking soldier to have been pulled out of the ARC, checked through his medical kit for the hundredth time and hoped he wasn’t going to have to use it on Liz.

 

            The door on the other side of the car park, which led upstairs into the block of flats, opened; a girl and a man came out of it and hurried over towards the small group clustered around the boot of the ARC’s Jeep. Ditzy recognised Lyle immediately, and knew the other girl by repute and a glimpse or two on previous occasions. Juliet Sayers was a little thing, slim and wiry in well-fitting jogging kit and a black hoodie. Under other circumstances, she would have been extremely pretty, with an unmarked roseleaf complexion, a delicate nose, soft, wavy blonde hair and large, shrewd blue eyes set in a fine-boned face. Now she just looked drawn and scared, her face set and colourless, a mouth more used to smiling fixed in a thin line, and her hair roughly pulled back in a ponytail.

 

            Ditzy asked himself, aloud but softly, if getting Juliet to show them where Liz’s penknife had been found was the right move.

 

            Stringer jerked his head sharply, not denying Ditzy’s concerns, but not agreeing with them either. “Juliet would go a lot further than this for Liz.”

 

            Ditzy fell silent, recognising that Stringer knew Juliet better than he did, or at least ought to, given that he had spent several months confounding Dr Sayers with chivalry, and was now sleeping with her. Lyle and Juliet caught up with the small group at last, and Ditzy found Lyle hiding his own anxieties with a professional facade, and Juliet harried and distant but still polite.

 

            “... Miss Sayers knows about the ARC, so don’t worry about need-to-know,” Lyle finished.

 

            Stringer made the error of shifting slightly, and Juliet’s blue eyes flashed to him. Ditzy realised she was more spirited than he’d originally thought, which made sense, given that her relationship with Liz was lasting better than most marriages and Liz would have lost patience with a doormat or a yes-woman months before.

 

            “I think it’s ridiculous,” she said, voice clear and level, “but I have better reason than most people to believe in it. And I don’t know who the _hell_ anyone would think I was going to talk to about it.”

 

            “You probably shouldn’t tell your mother,” Stringer pointed out mildly but implacably.

 

            “Bet you a tenner Liz’s dad is telling my mum right now,” Juliet said promptly, jaw set and eyes steely.

 

            Stringer’s eyes narrowed. “Done.”

 

            “Betting with Juliet is a great way to lose your money, mate,” Lyle told Stringer with a cheerful grin that sat uncomfortably on his face, and the party organised itself into one group in the ARC’s Jeep and another in Lyle’s own car, a battered runaround that was constantly threatening to fall to pieces at the most inconvenient moments, but which had untold reservoirs of space in the boot. ‘Like the TARDIS,’ Liz had remarked in one of her less shadowed moments the spring before last, ‘bigger on the inside and full of things that bleep and whistle and look like they’ve been dragged out of an Eighties prop cupboard,’ and Ditzy squashed affection and concern and the whole boiling lot of useless feeling in favour of keeping a sharp eye on Stringer’s driving, which frequently treated the Highway Code as the Highway Loose Guidelines.

 

            Stringer parked the Jeep next to Lyle’s car, perhaps five minutes away from the building Lester and his family lived in, in a car park Juliet seemed to have directed Lyle to. The girl in question narrowly avoided taking the door off Lyle’s car when she flung it wide open and climbed out with a regal disregard for what might be going on around her, such as other people’s cars trying to park; apparently fairy princess looks didn’t translate into mild and obliging fairy princess behaviour.

 

            This suspicion of Ditzy’s was confirmed when Juliet, now ghost-white with her hands stuffed into the large pocket of the hoodie she wore ( _LGBT: definitely not a sandwich_ , read the legend printed on it in fading, flaking white letters) with her eyes burning like gas flames, waited only the bare minimum of time for the others to get out and organise themselves before saying a few words to Lyle, turning on one delicate heel and marching off. They followed her, and Lyle walked slightly in front, eyes scanning the greenery.

 

            “Act normal,” Ditzy said pre-emptively to Lacey, who had just been cat-called by a passing teenaged cyclist who hadn’t noticed the flat shapes of knives in her jeans and the sleeves of her tracksuit top, and wasn’t in a position to spot the bulge of a handgun holstered at her shoulder.

 

            “So can I go and beat him up, then, sir?” Lacey muttered.

 

            “ _That’s_ normal,” Finn confirmed sententiously from behind her, and muffled a curse as Lacey paused long enough that her next step came down hard on his trainered toes; Lacey, unlike Finn, had not abandoned her army boots.

 

            Lyle’s head whipped round, but Lacey was already wearing an innocent expression, and Blade – who was facing in quite another direction, eyes searching the trees and ground for any sign of blood, a scuffle, or Liz herself – had somehow managed to move to cover his wincing colleague.

 

            “Can it,” Ditzy said out of the corner of his mouth, and gave a passing young mother with four toddlers and a harassed expression his most soothing smile. It was past ten o’clock on a summer Sunday: the park was heaving, although luckily Liz had chosen a relatively quiet corner of it to disappear in. Miss Lewis was going to have fun clearing this up.

 

            Temple tripped over his own feet and Lacey hauled him upright, just in time for Juliet to stop abruptly, the brown marks of dried blood at her feet.

 

            “Here,” Juliet said, perceptibly edgier than she had been in the underground car park. 

 

            “We’ll take it from here,” Stringer said. His voice was probably meant to be soothing; so was the hand he put on Juliet’s shoulder. It did not escape Ditzy’s notice that Juliet didn’t look soothed, or that her slim shoulders had tensed visibly under Stringer’s supposedly calming touch.

 

            Lacey, Finn and Blade moved smoothly from their positions at the back of the party, shunting Temple forwards until he stood with Juliet, Stringer and Lyle, practically on top of the bloody marks. Finn, whose amiable dimness was balanced by a pair of very sharp eyes, caught Lyle’s attention and wordlessly pointed to something thin and white lying in the dirt, half-concealed by a bush, on the other side of the low iron fence marking off the path: a pair of iPod headphones. Lyle looked at Juliet, one dark eyebrow raised.

 

            Juliet bit her lip; Ditzy saw blood rise from where her small white teeth dug in, and then it vanished as the girl sucked her lower lip into her mouth, attention fixed on the headphones. “I didn’t see those,” she said after a minute, releasing her lip. Beads of blood rose red to the surface. “Doesn’t mean they weren’t there. I didn’t see the knife until I stood on it.”

 

             Lyle nodded, and with a moment’s muttered conference between himself and Captain Stringer split the party into two groups: Finn and Stringer stayed behind with Temple and Juliet, and Ditzy, Lyle, Blade and Lacey went on ahead. Depending on what they found, Lacey or Blade might come back for the others, or they might not (Ditzy’s unhelpful mind filled in contingencies: an open anomaly, a corpse, Liz in a coma, Liz bleeding out, absolutely nothing at all). He shared a glance that spoke volumes with Blade, who dropped his impassive facade temporarily to give Ditzy a grim look that said he didn’t think much of Liz’s chances, then followed Lyle and Lacey over the railing. Because tact was not Lacey’s strong point, and because Lyle didn’t care very much who saw him doing what right now, both of them had drawn guns; Ditzy kept a hand on the butt of his handgun, but otherwise refrained, and a faint hint of steel in both Blade’s hands told him that Blade was making up for his deficiencies. Ditzy was too tense to roll his eyes.

 

            Immediately over the fence, just beyond the (remarkably prickly) bush Liz’s iPod cord had become caught in, they found signs of an ongoing fight: several prints of generic size 10 boots, mostly scuffed, the partial and muddled prints of one person in trainers, and clear prints from someone in expensive women’s walking boots, size six. The woman in walking boots was the only one not completely occupied by the fight; the person in trainers, presumably Liz, seemed to have resisted being dragged further into the greenery with all her not inconsiderable strength. But either the person wearing a size 10 could be in several places at once, or there were three or four of him, because the person in trainers had had no success. There were broken branches where someone, probably Liz, had grabbed at them to slow her passing and try to prevent herself from being dragged off. The marks of a large person falling into a bush, almost crushing it, suggested that she’d got in at least one very good blow and knocked one of her captors temporarily off his feet. Most interestingly, the spots of blood that were the remnants of the larger patch on the path itself, dried dark in the dust, were associated with the woman in walking boots.

 

            Ditzy didn’t think it was being premature to hypothesise that the woman in walking boots was Helen Cutter, and to mentally award a point to Liz for having stabbed one of the most spiteful schemers Ditzy had ever had the bad luck to meet.

 

            “She put up a good fight,” Lyle said under his breath, and Lacey nodded in a rather self-congratulatory fashion, considering that they were all well aware that Lacey had taught Liz a number of the more underhanded tricks Liz knew.

 

            Blade’s face had closed off suddenly, and he’d raised a hand to alert them all to his discovery and knelt down to grab something fallen under a bush: a blue iPod shuffle, still attached to a navy blue armband with Velcro fastening. He held it up.

 

            Lyle nodded grimly. “It’s hers.”

 

            Blade tucked the armband into a pocket, and they moved on, following the trail Liz’s fight had left, until they came to a small, dusty clearing, where the fight abruptly stopped, and Liz’s footprints turned to the heel-scuffs of an unconscious girl being dragged across the ground, feet trailing in the dirt. All the marks ended in the centre of the clearing, as if cut off by an invisible line.

 

            And, Ditzy noticed, there was a glint of plastic and glass, thrown away into the dust. Lyle picked it up, and Ditzy craned his neck to see: a phone, presumably the one Liz had failed to answer. An unsent text shone on the screen when Lyle poked it.

 

            _Don’t bother looking. HC._

 

            “Get Temple here,” Lyle grated. His knuckles had gone white; Ditzy genuinely thought he was going to break Liz’s phone, or, failing that, someone else’s bones. “I want to know everything he can tell me about the anomaly.”

           

            Ditzy caught Lacey’s eye, and jerked his head back in the direction of the group on the path. Blade knew Lyle better, and was better equipped to deal with him in this kind of a mood. Lacey went.

 

            “I’m going to kill Helen Cutter, Ditzy,” Lyle said very calmly, saved the text as evidence, and slipped the phone into his pocket.

 

            Ditzy just nodded, and watched Blade search the ground for any other marks, anything that might have indicated that Liz had regained consciousness, had kicked and fought her way out of Helen’s clutches and run. Except that Ditzy knew, and Blade knew, and all of them knew that that stark line on the ground was one that couldn’t have been faked, and that Liz Lester had been carried into that anomaly unconscious or too dazed to resist, and she had not come back out again.

 

            Ditzy thought seriously about Liz’s chances. She was in Helen Cutter’s hands, which could be a blessing or a curse. Helen Cutter wouldn’t want to lose the value of her investment, but she would also do her level best to stop her investment removing itself from her hands – and she clearly had soldiers at her command. Liz was strong and hard to scare, which was good; she knew a little about survival, a lot more about fighting, and couldn’t care less about rough conditions, which was better. Still, she was young, inexperienced, and knew very little about the anomalies. Even if she escaped and left Helen behind, she would be bloody lucky to find an anomaly back to the twenty-first century.

 

            Ditzy had seen good men vanish behind closed anomalies which had never opened. With a sinking heart, he realised the same was likely to be true of Liz.

 


	2. Chapter 2

            Liz Lester woke with a pounding headache and no idea where she was. A man in black was stooping over her; she threw up all over him, and started to apologise, until she realised she didn’t know him, and that his uniform – although it resembled the ARC’s Special Forces’ kit – wasn’t quite right.

 

            “Jon?” she said, and heard her own voice more feeble than usual; when he didn’t answer at once, she panicked. “Tanya? Ditzy? Blade? _Jon_!”

 

            “Ah,” a low, amused woman’s voice said, “awake, are you?” and Liz remembered a lot of things at once.

 

            She took a swing at Helen Cutter, and had the savage satisfaction of feeling the blow connect and blood spurt thin and hot under her knuckles before the men in black grabbed her and dragged her away. She wrenched free and dropped to the dusty ground, curling into a ball, knowing that in her weakened state she had even less chance of fighting them off than she had done caught off guard but uninjured in the park. She felt one solid kick land in her kidneys and gritted her teeth not to cry out, protecting her head as best she could.

 

            “ _No_!” Helen Cutter shouted, and the onslaught stopped immediately. “Leave her be,” Helen said more softly, her voice a little muffled by the cloth she was holding to her nose, which was dripping blood. “Back off. Let her breathe.”

 

            Liz stayed untouched. She waited thirty seconds and then slowly uncurled, sitting with her knees bent and her elbows resting on her knees, ready to drop her head between them if she felt like fainting – and what with the way her world kept blurring in and out of focus, she was very much afraid she would.

 

            “Give her water,” Helen ordered, and Liz jerked sharply as a plastic canteen was thrust in front of her face.

 

            She took it and drank from it. If Helen was going to knock her out – well, there wasn’t a lot to be done about that, was there? She needed water. She finished the canteen, in case Helen decided to take it away.

 

            “What do you want?” she demanded when she was done. She could hear the roughness in her own voice.

 

            “You,” Helen said, and involuntarily, Liz recoiled. She had a fairly good idea of what Helen had done to Professor Cutter’s best friend Dr Hart, although she hadn’t realised Helen swung both ways -

 

            Helen laughed, and her men followed suit in a ragged chorus. Liz blushed hotly.

 

            “Not like that, Liz,” Helen said, still kind, still nice. Liz wasn’t buying it. “I just want you to travel with me. That’s all.”

 

            “ _That’s all_ ,” Liz mocked, sour grin creeping onto her face. “And what if I want to go home?”

 

            Helen merely raised her eyebrows. Liz raised one right back at her.

 

            “You can try,” Helen said evenly, and gestured, arms sweeping through the air. “Look. Where do you think we are?”

 

            Liz looked round, and her heart sank. Around them was nothing but bare reddish dirt, a few spiny bushes, some scrawny trees; a sky burnt blue by heat, and faint grey shadows of mountains in the distance. She couldn’t see the tell-tale glitter of an anomaly anywhere close by, and it certainly wasn’t Battersea Park. She swallowed. “I have no fucking idea,” she said roughly.

 

            “It’s called the Permian, Liz, and it’s _glorious_.”

 

            Liz stared at her. “You’re completely fucking _crazy_ , lady.”

 

            One of the men in black twitched.

 

            Liz’s dazed brown eyes sharpened and glittered. “Go on, mate. See how much I care. You’ve already beaten the shit out of me – what’s another bruise between friends? Speaking of,” she added, twisting round, “what’s wrong with you that Mrs –”

 

            “ _Doctor_.”

 

            “- _Mrs_ Cutter doesn’t consider you and your sparkling wit enough companionsh- oh _shit_ , Cutter, what have you _done_ with them?” Liz stared, horrified, at the five men standing in a loose half-circle around her – all of whom, she had just realised, were absolutely identical, and worse, wearing identical expressions. “They’re...”

 

            “My boys. My clones.” Helen laughed. “They’re very good at following orders and very loyal. There’s another reason for you to mind your manners, Liz. Hurt me and they’ll kill you.”

 

            “So how come I’m still alive?” Liz wanted to know. A small, horrible smile slid onto her face. “Seeing as I put that hole in your arm.”

 

            “That? Minor. It bled like a pig, but minor.” Helen smiled and shrugged, indicating the neat bandage around her arm. She looked grotesque, Liz thought, dried blood on her lips and cheeks cracking as she spoke and expressions passed across her face.  


            “That’s the worst news I’ve had all day,” Liz said, almost truthfully.

 

            “You do take after your father,” Helen sighed. “One of the rudest men I’ve ever dealt with. Any more questions before we get moving? We’re vulnerable out here, you know. Especially considering the blood and vomit you’ve spilled. This place is in the middle of a mass extinction; the predators will go for any food they can get.”

 

            Liz quelled an instinctive shiver of fear and forced her mind to focus. Helen might never answer any of the questions Liz was itching with ever again, and Liz wanted answers nearly as much as she wanted to wake in her own bed with her girlfriend sleeping blamelessly beside her and her dad and Jon within easy reach of a well-timed scream, and know she was only dreaming. You didn’t sweat in dreams, your black t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms too opaque and thick; nor did your skin burn tight with the sun beating down. Lacking the assurance that she was just having a nightmare, Liz chose answers, and spoke. “Why me?”

 

            Helen looked questioning, and for one single second Liz understood how she might have taught people. “What do you mean?”

 

            “What about me makes you think I’ll be any use?” Liz elaborated. “Why did you choose me? Of all the people you could have dragged along, and I’m sure some of them would have gone with you happily if you’d looked hard enough. Stronger people, braver people, people who know more about surviving.”

 

            Helen was silent for a long moment, watching her. Liz gave her the bug-eyed stare of someone who has asked her questions and would like to hear some replies, sharpish. She used it on cadets who were trying to avoid giving a straight answer and her parents.

 

            “Why I chose you?” Helen said at last, slowly. “That’s simple. That’s very simple. You see, I don’t want a toy any more. I don’t want someone I’ll get bored of, no matter how good in bed they are, or how much I think I love them. I want someone to teach, someone I can pass on my knowledge to – it would be a waste if I died without telling someone my secrets. I want a right-hand woman. You fit the bill, Liz. You’re perfect. You know how to follow orders, but you have initiative. You actively like a rougher life. You know about the anomalies. You’ve survived in the face of at least two dinosaurs already, am I right? You want to push yourself to the limits. I can help you there. You give me your loyalty, and I’ll give you a world and power you’ve never dreamed of. Do you seriously think even a twenty-first century military will value your contributions the way I do? I’ve been watching you for a long time, Liz Lester, and I say you’re just the right woman for this job.”

 

            Liz let the silence hang for a very long time. Cold was pooling at the base of her spine, and she was trying to decide whether it denoted some kind of creepy time-travelling phenomenon she should know about, or whether it was just the fact that she found Helen expounding on her virtues as a potential second-in-command scarier than her very valid point about blood and vomit attracting predators.

 

            “I think,” she said, carefully, precisely, distinctly, “you have me confused with a mercenary.”

 

            Helen laughed. “No. No, I don’t. I don’t want a mercenary either – not someone who has to be bought. I want someone whose loyalty is to me and to the empire I’ve built on the right side of the anomalies.”

 

            “And you want that from me,” Liz said flatly. “You’ve kidnapped me. You’ve spied on me. And you think I’ll give you my loyalty.”

 

            “I think you will in time come to understand that the end justifies the means,” Helen told her coolly. “A philosophy I think we both share, at bottom.”

 

            “Hey,” Liz snapped. “I have limits, okay, I know when to stop, and you, I’d be surprised if you knew what a red traffic light meant, let alone being able to weigh up ends and means –”

 

            “And you’re a fighter,” Helen told her, looking pleased. “Just look at you. Sore as hell, recently dehydrated, a little traumatised, and there you are. On your feet and ready to fight another day. Admirable.”

 

            Liz crossly conceded that she was now on her feet, wavering but fundamentally steady, and didn’t remember standing up. “Do I look like a _pet_ to you? Quit talking to me like I’m your dog!”

 

            “I intend to treat you with the utmost respect,” Helen said, mock-solemn.

 

            “Bitch,” Liz said, and didn’t bother with keeping it discreetly under her breath.

 

            One of the clones stepped forward, and murmured something in Helen’s ear. “You’ve got a point,” she told it graciously, and Liz wanted to be sick it looked so happy.

 

            Helen looked back at Liz. “We’re moving on. Can you walk?”

 

            Liz thinned her lips. The anomaly she had been brought through was either closed or so far away that the ARC had no chance of finding her, if Helen had been allowed to remain undisturbed here for so long. Juliet would have raised the alarm when she’d been unable to find her, and although the lack of weight in her pockets told Liz that she was now unarmed and without her phone, those items and the iPod that had been strapped to her arm would be useful markers, proving her disappearance. She had little to no chance of survival on her own, even if Helen had managed it all those years ago. She had no choice but to follow Helen and humour her deranged plans until she could get free and get home.

 

            “I can walk,” Liz said.

 

            Her eyes burnt and prickled, her head ached desperately, she still felt sick, and she could see exposed skin turning raw, pink and painful, but she bit her tongue on her tears and didn’t cry.

 

            There was a way home; the madwoman leading her away from it was proof of that. And if it took her the rest of her life, Liz promised herself savagely, treading forward with heavy steps and seeing her feet trail and waver in the sand, she would find it.

 

                       

            Helen watched the girl carefully as they walked through the Permian. Liz’s recovery time was quick, her feistiness impressive, and Helen was certain that – if she could stop Liz from trying to kill her and run away, which she was convinced Liz was too practical to do just yet – her judgement call would be proved right. Liz was tall, strong and a born survivor; rigid, but not brittle. Helen had been keeping a careful eye on her since she’d met her at an anomaly in Redwood House boarding school. She’d thought Liz was potentially useful as a means for making trouble then, and had only later realised that Liz might be useful to her personally later.

 

            Liz was faltering; Helen wasn’t surprised and didn’t question her investment, even if it was close to folding under the midday sun. It was very hot, and they’d been walking for two hours. Liz was certainly burnt and probably dehydrated, although she’d been given another water bottle, and she hadn’t eaten for a while, though she had taken part in strenuous exercise and suffered a beating, even though Helen had successfully moderated the amount of violence that had been dealt out. None of these would have made her feel any better, or any kindlier towards Helen, but that could be fixed. She could feed Liz and patch her up and give her clothes and shoes that would work better in the environments they’d be travelling in. It wouldn’t make Liz trust Helen, but it would be a good start.

 

            The desiccating heat of the Permian was definitely getting to Liz, Helen thought, slowing to fall into step with her. Liz gave her a poisonous glare from brown eyes, lank dark hair flopping into her face where it had escaped a tight ponytail.

 

            “What do you want?”

 

            Liz’s voice was clear and loud, and lent itself too easily to sneering and swearing, but Helen hadn’t picked her out for her soft-spoken nature and beautiful manners, and she just smiled. “I wanted to let you know we’re nearing a regular anomaly, one I use a lot. We’ll be going through it.”

 

            Liz’s eyes flashed, as if the girl was disquieted. “Why?”

 

            “Because I have a home base there,” Helen said, without further elaboration. “It’s in the Devonian. Very safe, if you stay away from the water.”  


            “What’s in the water?” Liz said suspiciously.

 

            “Giant man-eating fish,” Helen said with relish. She didn’t go anywhere near the water in the Devonian, particularly not the seawater, and only approached rivers and lakes with a large stick, preferably pointy or on fire, to scare off the amphibians that infested the banks of most of the fresh water sources. They probably just wanted to know what she was, but Helen took no chances with that kind of thing.

 

            Liz pulled a face. “Nice holiday home.”

 

            “It’s cooler and quieter than here. You can sleep and eat, and I have sunscreen.”

 

            Liz looked down her nose at Helen. The words _don’t try to bribe me_ went unspoken but clearly acknowledged, and they fell back into an uneasy silence.

 

            Liz balked at the anomaly when they reached it five minutes later, raw face a pattern of uncertainty, but went through when Helen gestured at her to do so, as if she’d just been reminded of something unpleasant but quick that she’d agreed to do. She knew that the coolness of passing through the anomaly would have temporarily soothed Liz’s burns, but also suspected that Liz had grown up fearing anomalies, and sure enough, when Helen walked through she found her would-be apprentice as far away from the anomaly as the clones would let her go and eyeing it with deep suspicion.

 

            “They don’t bite,” Helen said mildly.

 

            “Oh yeah?” Liz snapped, and reeled off a list of names.

 

            “You’re going to need to be clearer than that if we’re going to work together,” Helen observed, and started Liz walking again. “Tell me as we go. Ten minutes’ walk from here only, I promise,” she added, putting a hand on Liz’s arm to guide her; it was a mark of how exhausted Liz was that she made only a token attempt to wrench it from Helen’s grasp. Liz’s trainers were sturdy, but she was limping, and she was whey-faced under her lobster covering – Helen wondered if she’d be able to make it up the scree slope which led to Helen’s hideaway.

 

            “Those are the names of the people the ARC has lost in the last year,” Liz said flatly. “Anomalies do bite. They just don’t bite you.”

 

            Helen laughed, but it was a shadow of her preferred seductive chuckle, because Liz’s production of those names had genuinely unsettled her. “Oh Liz. If only you could see my scars.”  


            “I can live without, thanks,” Liz said grimly, and Helen could catch the same instinctive revulsion in her eyes that had been there when she’d wrongly assumed Helen had picked her out for sex.

 

            “Don’t worry. Nobody’s making you,” Helen assured her, and stopped. “See? Here we are. Ten minutes exactly.”

 

            Liz looked up at the rock scree and the dark mouth of the cave, ten or twenty metres above ground level. “What if there are predators in there?”

 

            “I sent men on,” Helen said, pleased to be able to demonstrate to Liz how she’d out-thought her, anticipating the problem early on. “Don’t get used to it. We’ll be looking after ourselves most of the time.”  


            “I would rather –” Liz began, and stopped abruptly. Helen guessed that, like all melodramatic teenagers, she had meant to finish her sentence with ‘die’, and unlike most melodramatic teenagers had thought better of it.

 

            Helen smiled. “Come on,” she said gently. She could afford to be magnanimous right now, seeing as Liz was practically on her knees. “Up we go.”

 

            Liz made it up the scree with very little help and a lot of scrambling and gasped curses, as well as blood spilt on the sharp rocks when she fell and grazed one arm. Still, almost the moment she was within the cave – which was far larger than it had looked from ground level – she swayed and wavered on her feet, and Helen quickly guided her onto a sleeping bag and gave her somewhat lukewarm water to drink. Liz didn’t need to know about the other things she’d added to it.

 

            “Go to sleep,” she told Liz.

 

            Liz gave a derisive laugh, but her eyes were glassy over the top of the bottle and her eyelids flickering. “I know I’m going to sleep. I’m so fucking ti... Wait a minute. I wasn’t before... wasn’t tired before, only sick... Just _wait_. What’s in this... what’s...”

 

            “Go to sleep,” Helen repeated. It was nothing that would do Liz any harm; Helen was sure, now, that Liz was not concussed. She just needed to be sure that Liz slept while she was gone, and wouldn’t unnecessarily anger the clones or wander off.

 

            “Drugged me,” Liz murmured, “bitch...” and her voice trailed away as her eyes rolled backwards in her forehead. Helen caught her and lowered her onto the sleeping bag, then quickly stripped her down to her underwear and left her sleeping in the bag, a careful note made of shoe, clothing and bra sizes.

 

            Did it still count as retail therapy, Helen wondered as she left the cave, having given the clones specific instructions, if you did it for someone else’s benefit?


	3. Chapter 3

            Liz was still sleeping when Helen came back, chasing the last of the sunlight and consequently in a hurry. The amphibians that lived on the freshwater banks slept on said banks, out of the reach of any of the hungry predators that swarmed the seas and rivers, but at dusk they were more alert and more dangerous. Nothing that Helen hadn’t dealt with a thousand times before, but it paid to be careful – especially when the extra duffle bag she’d taken with her, empty, was now full, and heavy.

 

            Her investment was perfectly safe, watched over by the clones, who already hated her (and it was impressive, to have earned the enmity of a bunch of people who barely thought, whose only emotions were tied up in their creator). She looked younger when she slept, younger and less fierce, and Helen took the opportunity to ice her bruises, splint one broken finger and clean her cut knuckles. They were minor injuries, things that would heal, but Helen thoughtfully set aside some paracetamol, and then went to check on dinner’s progress. There wasn’t much to hunt in the Devonian, and in any case the clones could only cook if forced to memorise a recipe, but making a boil-in-the-bag meal wasn’t beyond them.

 

            She had her back turned when Liz stirred, which was not what she’d wanted; but turning abruptly would create a worse impression. She turned unhurriedly and smiled at her instead. “Awake?”

 

            Liz blinked up at the cavern’s roof, and then nodded. “You drugged me,” she said, without moving an inch. “How long?”

 

            “A few hours. You needed to sleep.”

 

            Liz let her head fall to the side so that she was scowling directly at Helen. “You undressed me.”

 

            “Mea culpa,” Helen said, amused. “I thought you would bake in that sleeping bag if I didn’t. Also, someone had to do something about your bumps and scrapes. Things get infected very quickly around here.”

 

            “And then you left?”

 

            “I had some things to get done while you slept,” Helen said, and indicated the duffle bag. “Get up and open it, Sleeping Beauty.”

 

            Liz swore at her, but sat up, dragged her dusty black t-shirt on, and reached for the duffle bag, pulling it towards her and opening it. Helen accepted a bowlful of the boil-in-the-bag meal and passed one on to Liz, who took it absently with muttered thanks, drilled good manners evidently not giving way in the face of her distaste for Helen. It was nondescript, some kind of beef curry, with soggy rice, but she’d eaten much worse and she didn’t think Liz would care. Helen tended to be a little hazy on time and dates, but she thought that it had been about a day since she’d taken Liz, and she would be surprised if Liz had had more than a snack before going out for her conveniently regular run.

 

            Liz set her bowl aside, frowning as she pulled out Helen’s purchases. A red t-shirt, a second sports bra to match the one she was wearing, two pairs of knickers, a light, warm jacket, and a pair of sturdy beige combat trousers, with more pockets than Liz could shake a stick at, a belt, plus a pair of robust walking boots, two pairs of thin socks, and a pair of thick walking socks. The kind of things Helen couldn’t buy without knowing Liz’s size in more detail than she’d been able to discover when observing her from a distance, although Helen had bowed to sentimental instincts in picking out the shirt; when she’d first seen Liz, the girl had been wearing a red hoodie.  She suspected Liz wouldn’t appreciate that point, so didn’t mention it.

 

            Liz stared at the things spread around her, all of them clearly brand new and shop-bought with tags still attached, and then looked up at Helen. “These were expensive.”

 

            Helen shrugged, and swallowed a mouthful of probably-beef. “You pay for quality.”

 

            “Where do you get the _money_?”

 

            “You might find that out one day,” Helen said. “Any more questions?”

 

            “Where did you get them from? If there isn’t a manhunt out for me right now I will be really bloody surprised.”

 

            Helen scooped up some rice. “Even your delightful father can’t get the Met out on such short notice, and I’m not stupid enough to go back to 2009. Eat your food before it gets cold.”

 

            Liz picked up the combination spoon-fork-knife thing Helen had given her (the packaging called it a spork: Helen called it convenient) and started to eat, steadily and mechanically. “You’ve never met my mother. And I wouldn’t put bets on what my dad or Jon will be prepared to do to get me back.”

 

            “Delightful as your interesting parental situation is,” Helen sighed, “just eat. And try on those clothes, I want to check they fit.”

 

            There was perfect silence. Helen looked up and realised that Liz had stopped, utensil frozen halfway to her mouth, every bruised and battered muscle tensed into a fair approximation of a hunting predator, eyes cold amber. In the flickering firelight, she looked demonic.

 

            Helen was reminded that, in choosing a dangerous young woman for her lieutenant, she had, in fact, chosen a dangerous young woman.

 

            The clones stirred. “Lady,” one said, one that Helen was slightly concerned about, on account of the fact that it was showing increasing signs of personality.

 

            “Stay out of this,” Helen whispered. She would either win this battle, or lose anything of use to her that Liz had, but letting the clones beat Liz to a pulp would achieve nothing.

 

            Liz let the silence stretch a little longer, and Helen felt hairs rise on the back of her neck. She’d had the odd unpleasant encounter with Jonathan Lyle, and recognised the expression on Liz’s face exactly, although she had no idea (and didn’t want to know) how Liz had acquired it. She had watched Kathy Burke from a distance, slowly and painfully shredding a junior minister, and had noted a certain fearless, damn-the-torpedoes-and-full-speed-ahead fierceness before she’d realised that she was standing in the Houses of Parliament and attracting a certain amount of attention what with the mud, khaki and healing wounds, and had left before the anomaly team had arrived. She had been interrogated by James Lester. She saw all three influences in Liz now, and she admitted to herself that she was afraid. Helen had not reached her position without acknowledging fear, and considered it a useful instinct, one to be treated with caution, scepticism and a healthy respect.

 

            “ _Never_ ,” Liz said calmly and deliberately, “talk about my family like that again. Do I make myself clear?”

 

            “Absolutely,” Helen replied evenly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it was such a sore point.”

 

            Liz held her eyes for a moment longer, and then went back to her half-finished meal. Helen scraped her plate clean, then decided that the call of nature was not to be ignored, and went in search of the bucket full of dirt and spade tucked behind a wall of wooden crates. Unfortunately, the clones were still not good at personal space or human emotions or other things that Helen had, come to think of it, particularly requested that they not experience, and the one showing signs of personality followed her. “Lady.”

 

            “This is a bad time,” Helen said, exerting bladder control. “What?”

 

            “The girl is not safe.”

 

            “No, she isn’t. I can handle it.”

 

            The clone looked flat and blank, which on him translated to unconvinced.

 

            “I chose her for what she is, the same way I chose you.” Helen narrowed her eyes and put menace into her voice. “Are you questioning my judgement?” 

 

             The clone shook his head. Liz laughed derisively from where she was evidently listening in – ears like a _bat’s_ ; but it was a useful quality and the cave was small, anyway – and the clone half-turned. Helen grabbed him. “Don’t _touch_ her.”

 

            Slowly, the clone relaxed.

 

            “Good,” Helen said more softly. “Better. Now. Leave me in peace.”

 

            The clone did as he was told. Helen relieved herself, and went back to Liz, who was now wearing her new clothes. Helen could have taken this as a sign of acquiescence and accepting her situation, but Liz was also grinning to herself, and that made Helen deeply suspicious.

 

            She hid it carefully, sitting back down on the floor, cross-legged. “All well?”

 

            Liz nodded.

 

            Helen smiled. “We’re going to have fun, you and I.”

 

            Liz smiled like a shark.

 

            Not for the first time, Helen wondered what she’d invited into her life.

 

***

             

            “Wake up.”

 

            Liz, who had been awake for the last twenty minutes, duly opened her eyes. A clone was looming over her; she squinted up at it, reasonably secure in the belief that Helen wouldn’t let it hurt her. “What?” she groaned, deliberately playing the cross, sleepy teenager. “Whassatime?”

 

            “Wake up,” the clone repeated, with nothing more than a pronounced scowl to indicate that her playacting was having any effect on it. It gestured. “Breakfast.”

 

            “Oh. Why didn’t you say?” Liz sat up, and realised that breakfast was porridge, a concoction she usually refused to eat, particularly when it came without any sweetener at all, as she suspected this would. “I’m going to get dressed,” she added pointedly. “Go away.”

 

            The clone moved off, and Liz grabbed her sports bra – _her_ one, not the one Helen had buggered off to some unknowing John Lewis to buy – and the new combats, which, Liz noted in the light of the fire, were in two pieces which zipped together, allowing her to turn them into shorts at will. Handy. She slid further into the sleeping bag, and, with some difficulty, put the sports bra on under the shirt she was already wearing. Similar contortions allowed her to put on the combats without incident, and then she slid out of the sleeping bag and put on the walking socks and boots. She had no objection to dressing and undressing in front of people, not really; she wasn’t prudish. But she didn’t like or trust Helen and her minions, and she felt vulnerable half-dressed.

 

            A clone, the same one that had been detailed to wake her – Liz thought – shoved a bowl of porridge and a cup of steaming instant coffee at her. Liz reserved considerable dislike for instant coffee, but took both the bowl and the cup anyway and thanked it graciously.

 

            “At least your father taught you good manners,” Helen commented, apparently amused. She seemed to be permanently amused or wary, and Liz preferred her off her guard, so she didn’t complain and resolved not to do anything to startle her just yet.

 

            “Delightful manners,” Liz agreed cordially. “What time is it? And what are we doing today?”

 

            Helen’s eyes sparkled. “So active and energetic. You’ll have to make allowance for my old bones.”

 

            Liz smiled blandly, and ignored the way Helen’s deep, deliberately sultry voice made the words sound sarcastic in the highest degree. “I’m good like that.”

 

            “I can tell. It’s a little before dawn.”

 

            Liz glanced at her watch, which read 11.25. She felt a jolt to her heart, and distantly identified it as confusion and distress. She couldn’t have been gone only three hours. No, that was ridiculous, Liz Lester, _get a grip_ , she berated herself, and forced herself to casually drag her eyes away from the watch.

 

            “Don’t bother,” Helen said. “In conditions like these your watch is useless. We’ll be moving through anomalies almost constantly, and do you really think that only time measured in thousands of years will change?”

 

            “Was that a rhetorical question?” Liz enquired, making sure to do so when she had a full mouthful of porridge.

 

            Helen winced. “Delightful manners, you said? I have no idea what you just garbled, but, before I was so rudely interrupted, I was going to say that even if anomalies didn’t open to different times in terms of minutes, seconds, hours and days as well as entire geological eras, time differs across those eras. Days here, by which I mean in the Devonian, last only twenty-two hours. Your watch will be completely confused.”

 

            “Okay, cool,” Liz said, swallowing a mouthful of porridge. It was vile, something that Liz, who cooked for fun as well as nourishment, found unforgivable. Cloning people evidently didn’t mean they were programmed to be Escoffier with a campfire – or maybe intelligence hadn’t been as high a priority as compliance when Helen was choosing her base material. “What are we doing today?”

 

            “We’re going to set off travelling,” Helen said. “I’m hoping to take you to the Cretaceous.”

 

            After being attacked by a deinonychus a few years ago, Liz had developed an unhealthy interest in dinosaurs which had been as brief as it was intense, and had led her father to observe privately that it was a little like watching his formidable PA research a new and troublesome enemy of the ARC’s, a process which involved spider diagrams and detailed lists of weaknesses and strengths. Not much of the information had stuck – she liked geography in general and geology in particular, but fossils featured as a very minor blip on her radar, and it had mostly been an exercise in trying to face down her fears – but the Cretaceous was well-known and easy to remember.

 

            “Grass,” Liz remarked eventually.

 

            Helen nodded.

 

            “Massive predatory dinosaurs.”

 

            Helen nodded some more.

 

            “Plus all the cool huge herbivores which would squish me flat with one foot.”

 

            Helen nodded again, halfway through her second bowl of porridge. A part of Liz that was always paying attention to peculiar things other people did wondered if she ate a lot when she could because she’d experienced starvation behind the anomalies, and if Liz herself should therefore force down a second bowl of porridge, but most of Liz was busy concentrating on the dangers Helen was about to inflict on her.

 

            “Are you _trying_ to get me killed?”

 

            “No,” Helen said, an unholy smile curving her lips. “I’m throwing you in at the deep end.”

 

            “There’s a _difference_?”

 

            “Yes. Now. I have more things for you, and we need to talk practicalities. Get yourself more porridge and coffee. I’ll be quite surprised if we find anything edible for lunch, unless there’s a decent stand of prototaxites somewhere...”

 

            “Prota-whats? And what do you mean by practicalities?” Liz’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not talking about periods, are you?”

 

            Helen chuckled. “In answer to your first question: giant mushrooms. In answer to the second: yes. I’m pleased to find you’re not silly about them.”

 

            Liz snorted. “I plumbed new depths of embarrassment when I had to explain them to a distraught baby cadet who couldn’t work out why she was bleeding. After that? All cool. Also, I don’t have them.”

 

            Helen looked genuinely taken aback. “Excuse me?”

 

            “I don’t have them,” Liz said again, and rolled up her left t-shirt sleeve, lifting her arm and poking a small, cylindrical bulge under the surface. “Implant. Got it six months ago. Nothing since. _Great_ call, seriously, no mess, no inconvenience, no nothing. I mean, mine weren’t that bad. I never got cramps or anything. But really, what a fucking nuisance. I don’t know why I didn’t get it before.” 

 

            “Very practical,” Helen said with a distinct note of approval. “In that case, unless something goes wrong with your implant, we won’t need to discuss that further.”

 

            “Good,” Liz said firmly. She’d had several awkward discussions with her mother on the subject of Your Changing Body from age ten onwards, and had no desire to repeat them – with added time-travelling goodness – with Helen.

 

            Helen’s eyes glittered, but she said nothing more on that subject. “Apart from that...” She snapped her fingers. “Liz’s rucksack, please.”

 

            A clone grabbed a large backpack, which had a bivouac sack rolled up and strapped to the top, a large, full water bottle jammed into a side-pocket and an empty one stuck in the other side-pocket, and various items – duct-tape, a roll of thin black cord – attached to webbing on the front by carabiners. Liz recognised one of the bits and pieces, a Leatherman multi-tool, and felt her stomach roll as if she might be sick; it was both hideously familiar and alien. Blade had carried one regularly, so she immediately associated it with him, and he was psychotic but safe and she trusted him. But it wasn’t her little Swiss Army knife, somewhere on bloodstained ground in Battersea Park, and her fingers itched with wanting to reach out and grab it, stick her hands carelessly into a pocket and find its well-known weight at the bottom. The clone threw the rucksack at her and she caught it automatically; it was heavy.

 

            Helen nodded at it. “Open it.”

 

            Liz did, and started to take things out. Her trainers, the clean red shirt, her tracksuit bottoms and the remaining clothes Helen had given her had been rolled up and roughly stuffed into the top, where they were stretching the zip; Liz thought to herself that she could pack them in way better than that. She pulled these out, and found underneath a packet of fish-hooks and line, a magnesium firestarter, a small selection of dried fruit, nuts and biltong (“emergencies _only_ ,” Helen said neutrally, and Liz nodded without looking up) fitted into an eating bowl along with another universal utensil, a small sleeping bag tightly rolled into its thin nylon case and a folded waterproof jacket. In another pocket of the backpack, she found a wallet with various kinds of currency in it, from modern pound notes to pound notes that had been printed three years after the kidnap and had clearly seen plenty of use, and a plastic card that was probably some kind of freaky future credit card, along with a wind-up torch, a sewing kit, and a first-aid kit that took some prising open. It was small, basic, nothing Liz wasn’t familiar with, and contained a tube of burn gel, which Liz would have thought was unnecessary if she hadn’t been burnt to hell and back by the Permian sun yesterday. Liz touched her pink, sore skin with careful fingers, and then squeezed out a dollop of the gel and spread it over the burns.

 

            “Good idea,” Helen said solicitously. “I put sun-cream on it for you earlier, there is a stock here, but it’s hardly the kind of thing you take out into the wild.”

 

            Liz suppressed a shudder at the thought of Helen touching her while she was sleeping, and put the burn gel away.

 

            “Re-pack it and try it out,” Helen invited, the least thinly-veiled order she’d given Liz yet. “See if it’s too heavy for you.”

 

            “It won’t be,” Liz said without thinking about it, and then bit her tongue as Helen smiled. No more of that, she told herself. Speak when you’re spoken to. Don’t get comfy with her. Don’t let her get comfy with you.

 

            She re-packed the bag more carefully than the clones had packed it in the first place, rearranging things until it shut more easily and fitted better, trainers and jacket at the bottom, other clothes on top, everything else fitted in in between and nothing where a thief with a knife could easily slash the bag’s material and grab for it. The rucksack had padded straps and a padded back; she got up, swung it onto her back, and walked a few paces up and down with it, then adjusted the straps.

 

            “Good?” Helen enquired.

 

            “Fine,” Liz replied, her tone somewhat ungracious. The bag was surprisingly heavy taken all together, but not actually uncomfortable.

 

Helen didn’t look bothered. “So long as you’re comfortable.”

 

Liz chewed her tongue on an _as if you care about that_ and moved the Leatherman attached to the bag’s webbing to her belt. “When do we go?”

 

“Easy, tiger,” Helen laughed, climbing to her feet. “In a moment, when I’m ready.” She dusted off her hands on her trousers and looked sharply at Liz. “We’ll be taking a minimal escort. I don’t want to be slowed down and the clones have other duties. But don’t think that just because it’ll be three against one rather than six against one that trying anything will be safer, Liz. Even if you do get away, you probably won’t survive alone in the Devonian, and you’ll never find another anomaly, much less an anomaly home. So no tricks, hmm?”

 

“No tricks,” Liz echoed smoothly, meeting Helen’s eyes.

 

“I almost believe you,” Helen remarked.

 

Liz’s face stayed blankly resentful as the rising sun poked fingers of light into Helen’s cave hideout, no changes to reveal her thoughts, no planning look to give her ideas away.

 

No tricks, she thought. Yet.


	4. Chapter 4

The walk to the anomaly Helen meant to take them through to the Cretaceous was reasonably long; three or four hours. Once Liz had got over the first wonder of a completely strange landscape she found it dull, for the territory was monotonous, damp brown dirt and spongy moss underfoot, the atmosphere humid and the sky flat blue, the day heating slowly in a way that suggested there would be more UVA beating down on her abused skin and making it feel tight and painful again. There was no talking, except when Helen slowed to point out a thin copse of large tree things and proudly tell Liz these were the first large plants in the world, and that in two hundred years’ time they would have colonised this whole area and Helen and Liz would be walking through forest. Several times Liz considered detouring closer to the banks of a stream they were following in order to pick up some water in her empty water bottle and pour it over her burns, but whenever she moved even a little closer the clones nudged her away. The fourth or fifth time this happened, when the nudges were devolving into shoves, Helen turned her head.

 

“What do you want, Liz?”

 

“Water for my burns,” Liz said tightly, staring down the clone who had just pushed her hard enough to make her stumble.

 

Helen sighed. “I know how you feel, but can it wait? We’re almost at the site. And this area is full of ictheostega.”

 

“Icthywhat?”

 

“Ictheostega.” Helen waved a hand at the forms on the stream’s banks. “The bigger ones that the littler ones stay away from.”   


Liz stared for a moment at the sunning amphibians, and conceded that there was such a pattern. “What are they?”

 

“Amphibians. Carnivores. Some of the first land animals.” Helen regarded them with scientific interest. “The smaller ones are more of a nuisance than anything else, really, but ictheostega aren’t just big enough to take you or I down, they’re ambush predators. They’re more dangerous in the daylight, and they prefer slow or even still water, like this. Look in the stream. There, where it’s sluggish. See?”  


Liz picked out the smooth mottled skin of ictheostegas lurking in the water.

 

“Hm,” Helen said, sounding intrigued, “that one’s seen something. Back off a little, everyone. Liz, you might be about to see your first hunt.”

 

Liz retreated a couple of steps, and found the slow-moving V trail representing the ictheostega’s passage in the water with her eyes. Her stomach jangled with something that might have been nervousness, even though she knew – or suspected, anyway – that the ictheostega wasn’t interested in them. It slid closer and closer to its prey, which Liz guessed was the small amphibian about to slide back into the water.

 

The ictheostega struck in a rush of water and sudden sharp teeth, and Liz started instinctively. There was little noise other than a couple of odd-sounding croaks from the small amphibians, because the creature had got its prey by the head, and was now slipping into deeper water with the still-thrashing corpse. A film of red was blooming in the water, and other ictheostegas had slipped off the banks, heading for the successful hunter. Liz turned away before she could see them tear the prey to pieces, and found herself squarely meeting the eyes of the clone that had shoved her.

 

“I don’t know what you think you’re looking at,” she said tartly, and the clone smiled. Liz pretended she didn’t find the expression frightening on its blockish, bland face.

 

“Your reaction,” Helen answered, as if that was a totally normal and reasonable thing to say.

 

Liz’s head whipped round and she scowled. “What? It’s the oldest story ever told. Predator meets prey.”

 

Helen smiled again. “But you see why I don’t want to pick up water until we’re at a faster source? Ictheostega aren’t well adapted to fast water, they stay out of it. That makes it exponentially safer for us.”

 

Liz nodded reluctantly, and they started to walk again.

 

Eventually they reached the site where the anomaly ought to be and wasn’t. Liz looked around for it ostentatiously, then gave Helen her most wide-eyed enquiring stare.

 

“We have a little time to wait and relax,” Helen said, unruffled. “And there are few safer places to do it in, this side of the anomalies.”

 

Liz examined her surroundings. They were in a copse of the tree-things Helen had rhapsodised over earlier, but this one was thicker, and surrounded a small waterfall and large spreading pool beneath which appeared to be free of the amphibians, possibly because they couldn’t make it down the steep drop that created the waterfall. There was also, growing in the damp ground around the pool, a bunch of funny tall grey mushroom-type... fungi. Liz stared at them a bit.

 

“Prototaxites,” Helen remarked. “Edible. Get your water, Liz. Boys, light a fire, we’ll be here a while.”

 

The clones nodded and set to with a magnesium firestarter like the one Liz had been given and bits and pieces from the tree things, while Helen cut chunks from the prototaxites. Liz decided to ignore all of them, and picked up her empty water-bottle, going to the edges of the pool to fill it. There were only small, ugly fish in there, no amphibians; she took care not to accidentally scoop one up, then splashed her face with the water and poured it over her arms, before filling the bottle again and repeating the process. The burns weren’t massively painful, but they felt so much better for the cool water, and Liz was immeasurably grateful for it.

 

After some faffing about, the clones had got a fire lit – impressive, considering the damp material they had to work with. When Liz finally turned back and waded out of the pool’s shallows, Helen was absently roasting chunks of mushroom stuff on a very large, stout knife, turning them thoughtfully in the flames and watching them brown.

 

“Is that even edible?” was the first thing Liz said.

 

“Absolutely,” Helen said, prising a slice off her knife and popping it into her mouth. “More so than the fish, anyway. The fish tastes lousy and you have to fight the amphibians for it.”

 

“And the amphibians...?”

 

“Gluey,” Helen said definitively, and pointed to the bowl of prototaxite beside her. “Feed yourself. You can have some too,” she added graciously to the clones.

 

Liz, who suspected that the clones hated her already and wouldn’t want her to have access to much of the food, took a large handful of the pieces and started to thread them onto the different branches of her multi-tool for easy roasting.

 

“Good, yes?” Helen said, watching her nibble at her first one.

 

“All right,” Liz said cautiously. It was a weird texture, chewy and strange, but the taste was all right, which, Liz told herself, was the key thing.

 

“You want them almost burnt,” Helen advised, toasting one of hers to the point where it started to smoke. “They take on a very interesting flavour then, and the texture isn’t quite so bad.”

 

“Huh,” Liz said, trying it with the next chunk. “Not bad.”

 

One of the clones set its meal on fire. Liz fought hard not to laugh.

 

 

Several hours of waiting later, after Liz had reapplied water to her burns and tuned out Helen’s attempts to orient her as to when the Devonian was, geologically speaking (because she didn’t actually give a shit) there was a sudden flash in the corner of her vision, and she jumped up involuntarily.

 

She’d spent years thinking of anomalies as things to run away from. The past day or so hadn’t done much to change that. The slowly swirling panel of shards she was now staring at scared her.

 

“Check it out, boys,” Helen said without looking up, and the clones got up and walked straight through it.

 

Liz blinked, tried and failed to grasp how anyone could just walk into an anomaly like that, and slowly sat down again. She’d never meant to get up in the first place.

 

After a moment, the clones reappeared. Helen cast a questioning glance at one of them, and it nodded.

 

“Good,” Helen said, and stood and stretched leisurely. “On your feet, Liz. We have some more walking to do.”

 

***

 

Juliet wasn’t precisely tall. She was perfectly built for a ballet dancer, slender with long, lean muscles and elegant feet that pointe shoes would take at least twenty years to wreck, and she had personality that made her seem taller than she was, even when she was curled into Liz’s lap or cuddled under Liz’s arm, a glowing positive to Liz’s photo negative. But she was undeniably short. Liz, whose growth spurt was only just showing signs of tapering off at the age of sixteen-going-on-seventeen and who was the same height as her father already, often made a joke of it.

 

Still, Lester thought, as the reduced group from the Park joined himself, his best friend, and his Head of PR in his flat, he had never seen Juliet look so small. And he didn’t think it was just the fact that she was being escorted by a number of very large men that made her seem that way.

 

Emily’s sharp intake of breath suggested that she thought much the same thing. “ _Sweetheart_.”

 

Juliet went to her mother without saying a word, and buried her head in the older woman’s shoulder. Emily stroked her sweat-damp blonde hair and kissed the side of her head. “So she is gone, then? Through one of your anomalies?”

 

She was talking to the soldiers and to Jenny and Lester.

 

“Ha,” Juliet said, muffled in Emily’s shoulder. “Joel, you owe me a tenner. I told you so.”

 

“I said you shouldn’t bet with Juliet, mate,” Lyle added, although he looked five years older than he had done just three hours ago. “I also told you so.”

 

Stringer grimaced. “Fine, you were right.”

 

“He had to say something,” Emily said reasonably. “What was I supposed to think, that Liz had been kidnapped by terrorists?”

 

Lester felt the emotional blow as if it were a physical thing, and winced. “If you knew more about Helen Cutter, Emily, you’d know how right you are. Jon, where are the others? They haven’t – the anomaly isn’t-”

 

He felt a surge of hope, crushed when Lyle shook his head grimly. “The anomaly’s closed. Liz went in and she didn’t come back out again.” He paused. “She fought every step of the way.”

 

And maybe that was the most painful thing of all, the most painful part of a disaster he could never have imagined happening before today. At least he always knew there was a chance Jamie would die, and that Jamie had made a choice in the end, had taken his life into his own hands and done what he wanted with a maturity he should never have developed so young. But Liz – Liz burned brightly, she was strong and brave, and Helen snatched her when neither he nor Lyle was looking, and he had no idea if he would ever get her back. Lester closed his eyes. His daughter fought and she still didn’t win out, never mind her brute strength, never mind her martial arts lessons – both the formal ones, and the occasional demonstrations she had from Lyle and from Private Lacey, the ones she thought her father didn’t know about.

 

“James. James, _look at me_.”

 

Lester opened his eyes, and realised that Lyle was standing in front of him, hands on his shoulders gripping just a little too tight, hazel eyes hard and mouth set in a fierce line. “We’re getting her back,” Lyle said, every single word ringing with raw determination. “I don’t know how yet. But we are. I _promise_.”

 

 “I believe you,” Lester lied, and knew by the look in Lyle’s eyes that he’d caught the falsehood and that there would be words about that later.

 

“Besides,” Juliet added matter-of-factly, extricating herself from her mother and scrubbing her hands over her face, “it’s not like Liz won’t be trying to get back here. You’ll probably meet in the middle in a week’s time, and she’ll be all _what took you so long_? And then I will smack her for being an idiot.”

 

“Juliet Fiona,” Emily said severely, but Lester could see relief in the twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth, “in this household, we do not condone domestic violence.”

 

“Am not condoning it either,” Juliet said, stalking off in search of a glass of water. She looked as if she was forcing her buoyancy to lift the mood, but it appeared to be working, so Lester wouldn’t complain. It wasn’t as if Emily wouldn’t be keeping a very careful eye on her. “I’m just saying. When Liz gets back, she might just run away again, because she is going to be in _so much trouble_.”

 

“That’s the spirit,” Lyle said. His grin was forced, too.

 

“I’ve never seen a challenge Liz didn’t immediately attempt to eat for breakfast,” Lester conceded, and managed a rather faint smile.

 

“I almost feel sorry for Helen Cutter,” Jenny admitted. “And now, because nobody else appears to be going to ask – Lieutenant, have you finally given in to temptation and beaten Connor over the head and dropped his body in a skip, or did you leave him and the other half of your merry band back at the site?”

 

Lyle snorted. “No, he’s back at the site with a bunch of gadgets and some technobabble.”

 

“In that case,” Jenny said, effortlessly taking charge – and Lester thought it was a sign of how at sea he felt that he didn’t bother disputing it – “can I suggest we relocate to the ARC?”

 

“Can I suggest I change?” Juliet said, gulping down her glass of water. She was dishevelled, Lester conceded, this much was true.

 

“I brought spare clothes for you,” Emily informed her daughter.

 

“There’s a changing room at the ARC,” Jenny said. “Along with showers.”

 

“My forward thinking didn’t stretch as far as shower-gel,” Emily conceded.

 

“It’s okay,” Juliet said, easily, as if she wasn’t thinking, “I’ll borrow Liz’s,” and if Lester had thought she was pale before, she went paper-white now.

 

“Naturally,” Lester said blandly. “Why don’t you go and pick up those, Juliet, and Emily, if you’d be so good as to give myself and Juliet a lift to the ARC? I can give directions.”

 

Juliet nodded jerkily and went away in the direction of the bathroom, returning after a couple of minutes still composed and carrying bottles of shower-gel, shampoo and conditioner. “Will I be able to borrow a hairdryer?” she asked Jenny matter-of-factly. “And a towel?”

 

“I keep spares in my locker,” Jenny said, equally practically. “You can borrow mine.”

 

“Wait,” Lyle interrupted. “Does this mean I get to drive the Merc?”

 

“Considering how long it took you to realise,” Lester said severely, “I’m not sure.”


	5. Chapter 5

            On the whole, Juliet thought very little of the ARC. It was glossy and interesting-looking, yes, but she cared next to nothing for that right now, and anyway, no matter how sci-fi the machine in the atrium (the ‘Anomaly Detection Device’?) looked, Lester’s office was depressingly corporate. She got some odd stares as she let Jenny lead her down to an honest-to-God changing room, with showers and cubicles for changing in and everything, and allowed Jenny to stuff a very fluffy towel and a compact hairdryer into her hands, to go on top of the bag of clothes her mother had already handed to her. She wasn’t terribly concerned by the stares, but she was pretty interested in the fact that even a dinosaur-chasing government organisation required a changing room.

 

            Juliet colonised one of the few individual cubicles in the changing room and stripped off, then wrapped herself in the towel, picked up her ill-gotten toiletries, and selected one of the individual showers. The water was lukewarm, but got up to temperature quickly, and as Juliet started to wash she actually had to turn it down because it was too hot. ( _Liz would laugh at me for that_ , she thought, and forced the faint traitorous murmur into the back of her mind, because – although no-one can see you cry in the shower – it is also infinitely easier to get shampoo in your eyes.) She applied herself to the problem of her hair, the washing of which was always a production because there was so much of it, and realised mid-way through using half a bottle of conditioner to work out the tangles that she had no comb or brush.

 

            “What’s done is done,” she said aloud, and rinsed her hair until the water ran clean through it and her fingertips were beginning to shrivel. The water was also getting cold, so she scrambled out and dived back into her chosen cubicle, shivering.

 

            Needless to say, her mother’s selection of clothes was not what she would have picked out, but then what do you wear to tour a super-secret government facility? Juliet dried herself off and wrapped her hair in a neat towel turban, then dressed without thinking too much about the fact that her mother had looked in her wardrobe and decided that jeans, glittery purple ballet pumps, a lilac cardigan that definitely wasn’t hers and a pinstriped work-experience blouse were ideal sartorial weapons for facing down Liz’s disappearance. She was slightly impressed by the way Emily had managed to colour-coordinate it all despite being stressed as hell, but not impressed enough to think that even an interestingly ruffled cardigan was a good idea.

 

            She had to leave the cubicle in order to dry her hair, because the hairdryer needed a socket, but couldn’t suppress a shiver of anxiety and an automatic instinct to straighten to her full height and glare daggers at her own reflection when she saw the swinging doors to the changing-room so much as twitch. She was prepared to deal with people staring nosily when she wasn’t trying to render herself presentable, but she needed space and time to put her mask on.

 

            Juliet needn’t have worried. Only one woman came in, a strong young woman of medium height with glossy brown hair caught up in a short ponytail, dressed in casual clothes. She only gave Juliet one brief and apparently incurious glance before moving on to the single bank of lockers kept inside the changing-rooms and opening what must have been hers to fiddle about with something inside. Juliet wondered briefly why her locker was here, when most of them were outside, and then applied herself to drying her hair, which was even more time-consuming than washing it.

 

            About twenty minutes later, when her hair was nearly dry but wouldn’t pass the mother-grabs-handful-and-declares-still-damp test, Juliet realised there was another woman standing a polite couple of feet behind her shoulder, and dropped Jenny’s hairdryer. It clattered on the tiled floor, and turned itself off reproachfully. Muttering curses, Juliet knelt and picked it up.

 

            “Sorry,” the woman said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

 

            “No, really?” Juliet snapped, and then caught herself before she said anything worse, appalled. “I’m sorry, I’m just –”

 

            The woman was already shaking her head. She was black, in her mid-to-late twenties and dressed with a Boden-esque emphasis on the smart-casual; she looked mild and approachable. “That’s fine.” She held out a wide-toothed comb. “Jenny said she forgot to lend you this.”

 

            “Thanks,” Juliet said, with more relief than she should probably have admitted to, and readily accepted the comb. She knew if she left her hair in its current tangled state it would be a giant knot by the time she got home. “Who are you, by the way?”

 

            “Lorraine Wickes,” the woman said. “James Lester’s PA.”

 

            “Juliet Sayers. Nice to meet you,” Juliet said, tearing tangles out of her hair with more ferocity than kindness.

 

            “Likewise,” Miss Wickes said politely, although Juliet was ninety-nine percent certain she had better things to do on a Sunday morning than watch over the boss’s daughter’s girlfriend, and said so.

 

            Miss Wickes smiled, and it was polite but non-committal. “Actually, my boyfriend’s watching the anomaly site right now, and my plans involved spending the day with him. So no, not really.”

 

            “Ouch,” Juliet said, both in reference to the massive knot she’d just ripped out and Miss Wickes’ answer. “So Liz and I collectively managed to ruin both your days. Good going.”

 

            She managed to say Liz’s name without even a slight hesitation and it only ached, instead of driving a knife of misery between her ribs. She thought that was good going, too.

 

            Miss Wickes arched an eyebrow. “Somehow I think you’re having a worse day than either of us. And really, I think Niall rather enjoyed preventing Lieutenant Lyle from taking chunks out of passers-by. He finds the role reversal refreshing.”

 

            Juliet had only just got over the first sentence when a tiny sneaking part of her brain flagged up the last two as weird. “I’m sorry?”

 

            Miss Wickes smiled slightly.

 

            “By role reversal, do you mean... uh, Niall, usually takes chunks out of innocent bystanders?”

 

            “No,” Miss Wickes said calmly, and Juliet instantly felt embarrassed for having entertained the thought.

           

            “Oh. Uh, er –”

           

            “Usually, I stop him.”

 

            There was a brief pause, in which Jenny’s comb got stuck in Juliet’s hair, and Juliet took the opportunity to turn around and stare at Miss Wickes. “Are you trying to distract me?”

 

            “I thought I was succeeding,” Miss Wickes said.

 

            “You are, I’m sorry, but seriously, you are a massive _troll_.”

 

            “Excuse me?”

 

            “You’re just _messing_ with me,” Juliet translated in exasperation, and restrained the impulse to stamp one small foot. “Could you at least take this seriously?”

 

            “I’m taking it very seriously, Miss Sayers,” Miss Wickes said. “And on that note, I would like to say that Tanya came down here and thought you looked in need of a friendly face, so I volunteered.”

 

            Juliet started up the hairdryer again and counted to a hundred mentally. “Do you know where my mother is?” she asked when she felt she could trust herself.

 

            “I arranged a tour of some of the less classified labs. If you want her with you, then that can be arranged.”

 

            “No, I’m fine,” Juliet said automatically, and decided that her hair was probably dry enough to pass muster. She went through it one more time with the comb, and then plaited it. She still had the hairband she’d kept it up in earlier.

 

            “Would you be prepared to give me an official statement of what happened in the park?”

 

            Juliet fumbled the end of her plait, something she hadn’t done since she was twelve, and stared at Miss Wickes, who was meeting her eyes in the mirror’s reflection. The question had come out as serene and mild as any of the others, including the deliberately frustrating ones.

 

            “I thought it would be easier than Sir James.”

 

            “Yes,” Juliet said rather numbly. “Yes.” There was a long pause. “I should give Jenny her things back.”  

 

 

            It was easier than Juliet expected, to follow Lorraine up to a shared office next to Lester’s, which was a little smaller and a lot more filled with clutter, although similarly glass-walled. Miss Wickes closed the door, wrote a DO NOT DISTURB sign, and neatly stuck it to the shut door. “That’s Jenny’s desk,” she said, indicating a desk with what looked frighteningly like a Chanel handbag dumped on top of it.

 

            Juliet, feeling as if a damp towel, a comb, and a hairdryer were not worthy companions, cautiously set them down beside the desk.

 

            “Borrow her chair,” Miss Wickes prompted. “She won’t mind.”

 

            Awkwardly, Juliet pulled the computer chair over so that it was closer to Miss Wickes’s, and sat down. The older woman retrieved a very smart-looking green leather-bound notebook stamped with her initials, of the kind where you could get replacement pages; Juliet squinted, and spotted tell-tale blue Smythson paper.

 

            “Nice,” she said.

 

            “Christmas present,” Miss Wickes said, and looked adorably pleased, from which data Juliet deduced that, despite apparently unfortunate interpersonal skills, Niall had great taste in Christmas presents. She pulled out a fountain pen and a dictaphone as well, and set the latter to record. “Just tell me what happened. Go at your own pace; we’re in no rush.”

 

            Juliet stared at her own feet in their incongruously glittery shoes, swallowed, drew a useless breath, let it out again, and started to talk.

 

            Miss Wickes was right. It was easier than telling Liz’s dad would have been.

 

 

            About ten minutes later, Juliet trailed to a slow stop. “I think that’s everything.”

 

            “All right. Thank you, Juliet,” Miss Wickes said quietly, in the same gentle, bland tone she’d prompted Juliet with occasionally, and turned off the dictaphone. “Niall, I distinctly remember putting up a sign that said ‘Do Not Disturb’.”

 

            Juliet glanced round sharply, and the green-eyed man who had seemingly been standing outside the office for a while gave up on subtlety and walked straight in.

 

            “I wasn’t disturbing you,” he protested, with a disarming grin that was completely not directed at Juliet. This was a novel experience for her; in her experience, if there were disarming grins going round, one was generally aimed at her, but it was obvious that whoever this guy was he had no eyes for anyone but Miss Wickes. Juliet squelched the temptation to murmur ‘awww’ under her breath, and decided that the pair of them were very sweet together, based on less than two seconds’ observation. It was easier than thinking about Liz.

 

            Miss Wickes relented only slightly. “You were loitering with intent. Was there something you wanted?”

 

            There was a distinctly mischievous glitter in those eyes – and, well, _wow_ , Juliet had thought Simon had very green eyes, but – okay, she was staring, tone it down, Sayers. He did sort of look like he could take people to pieces. With his bare hands, if necessary. But, well... _wow_. Juliet lived and studied alongside a bunch of gorgeous boys whose working attire consisted largely of a pair of tights, and not one of them managed to exude the sheer volume of sex appeal this guy did.

 

            “Don’t even go there,” Miss Wickes warned, but she was smiling slightly.

 

            “I wasn’t going to,” Niall said, with blatant untruthfulness. “I just came to ask if you wanted lunch, and also to tell Miss Sayers that her mother is waiting for her downstairs in the rec room with about half a ton of Hawaiian pizza.”

 

            Juliet’s stomach rumbled, and she blushed.

 

            “Don’t tell me you bothered with breakfast,” Miss Wickes said, smiling outright. “I’ll know you’re lying. Juliet, this is Corporal Richards, generally known as Blade.”

 

            “I thought you called him Niall,” Juliet said, feeling confused and stupid after ten reasonably painful minutes of dredging up every fleeting detail of memory on the sliver of a chance that it might help Liz.

 

            “She does,” Niall (Blade? Corporal Richards?) said, grinning at her. “But then, she’s mine – _ow_!”

 

            Juliet’s giggle took her by surprise, but if whatever his name was hadn’t seen that scrumpled-up ball of paper coming and deliberately not moved, she would eat her pointe shoes.

 

            “Go away and take Juliet down to the rec room,” Miss Wickes ordered. “I need to finish off here.”

 

            He saluted. Miss Wickes rolled her eyes at him. “Shoo.”

 

            “Going. Miss Sayers?”  


            “Coming,” Juliet retorted, and Miss Wickes smiled absently, typing something out on her computer.

 

            She felt strangely reluctant to go. It wasn’t that she thought Miss Wickes would have thrown her to the wolves, if only because she probably wouldn’t have wanted to deal with the paperwork. But she felt like she more or less knew where she was with Miss Wickes now, and everything in this was so confusing she felt like she had to hang on as tightly as she could to the few things that made sense, in case they slipped her grasp, and she was left floundering in a sea of miscellaneous factoids.

 

            Juliet Sayers was one of the cleverest girls at her school, excepting maths. She was not used to things she couldn’t understand.

 

            “Liz’s girlfriend, right?”

 

            “Yeah,” Juliet said distantly, back on the _where is Liz, I’m going to kill her when I get her back, where_ is _she, why isn’t she here right now_ mental track again. “Call me Juliet.”

 

            “Liz calls me Blade. When she’s not calling me a psycho.”

 

            That got Juliet’s attention. “You know Liz?”

 

            “A little.” Blade looked down at her, handsome face serious. “We’ll get her back.”

 

            Juliet suddenly found herself short of words, and also breath to speak them with. She looked down at the floor and nodded.

 

            “Rec room. Here we are,” Blade said, bland as if he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary to her.

 

            Juliet nodded, because she still wasn’t doing well on the words front, and went forward, to where her mother, Lester, Lyle and Stringer were holding court over a giant pizza order.

 

            “Are you all right, sweetheart?” Emily said quietly, drawing her down to sit next to her. Juliet sat down on the arm of her armchair, and allowed herself to be hugged.

 

            “I’m OK.”

 

            “More people will be coming,” Lester warned her. “None of the people who came in because – of today’s emergency thought to bring any lunch.”

 

            “That’s okay,” Juliet said. The hitch in Lester’s voice wouldn’t have been noticeable, if you didn’t know him.

 

            “I trust you were all right with Lorraine,” Lester continued. “I didn’t intend her to get Corporal Richards to escort you here. He can be a little...”

 

            “Deranged?” Juliet supplied. “Miss Wickes said. But no. It was fine.” She sniffed, and wiped her nose on her wrist, considerately avoiding the sleeve of her mother’s cardigan. “Although when I realised he was her boyfriend I kind of thought I should’ve high-fived her. I mean. _Damn_ , girl.”

 

            Her mother burst out laughing, and Juliet felt the tight squeeze of Emily’s arm around her waist. _Relief_ , she translated, and closed her eyes.

 

            Aeons stretched between her and the Juliet who had slipped on a knife earlier that day, but she knew it had only been about five hours. How was she going to stand the rest of the time? A couple of jokes couldn’t keep her going for long.

 

            _Liz_ , she thought miserably, and allowed her mother to cuddle her and feed her pizza.


	6. Chapter 6

            “Go on,” Helen said. “Go through.”

 

            “What?” Liz said, still staring at the anomaly.

 

            Helen gestured at it. “Through. Come on, Liz. You’re brighter than this.”

 

            Liz felt the word _but_ on her lips and crushed it ruthlessly. Hesitation was just what Helen was looking for. But it felt wrong, to deliberately walk through an anomaly, it felt too risky...

 

            “Scared?” Helen taunted softly, the word falling like a lead knife between them.

 

            “Of course I fucking well am,” Liz said, and walked through the anomaly.

                                                      

            _It’s not weakness if you tell them all about it_ , she thought as she marched straight through, and shivered because it was just like walking through a sheet of cold water that didn’t actually get you wet. Then she looked out at her surroundings, because she was sensible and she hadn’t shut her eyes to go through.

 

            “ _Shit_.”

 

            Helen laughed, and Liz cursed herself because she hadn’t even noticed her come through. “Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?”

 

            ‘Beautiful’ was an understatement. The Cretaceous was stunning, lush and green with thick new grass and actual flowers, bright tropical-looking things sprouting from dark green bushes with thick shiny leaves, in among entire hedges’ worth of lethal-looking spines, sprouting small and jewel-like in among beds of ferns. There were proper trees and a gunmetal grey sky which made all the colours seem more intense and brighter.

 

            There was also a faint sound of something moving, and all four people standing and marvelling at an ancient landscape looked up sharply. The clones readied their weapons, but Helen raised a sharp hand, and the slim-bodied creature with its massive eyes that appeared from a thick stand of bushes, some of which it was still thoughtfully chewing on, seemed completely uninterested in them.

 

            “Leaellynasaura,” Helen announced in a soft, hushed voice. “Herbivorous. Quite small by the standards of the period. And where there’s one, there’ll be hundreds. Let’s get out of the way, boys. And Liz, of course.”

 

            Liz followed Helen and the clones in skirting the dinosaur very carefully, and treading slowly and softly through the undergrowth. She kept a careful eye out for any more, knowing that it might well be a herbivore, but was also too large for safety, although she desperately wanted to look back and have a proper stare. She caught sight of one – two – three more, and maybe a fourth, with what looked like a little one at its feet. She wanted to stop and watch, fascinated against her will by the massive creatures, so different from anything she’d seen before, but she knew she couldn’t stop, and in a time period where something that size was considered small she’d be toast if she didn’t keep up with people who knew what they were doing here.

 

            “We’ll find you something more picturesque to watch,” Helen promised in a murmur, dropping back to join her, and Liz nodded.

 

            They came out of the undergrowth to a steep cliff, overlooking a broad, grassy plain through which a silvery river ambled, and on top of which – Liz’s breath caught – an entire massive herd of triceratops was grazing. Or – they didn’t look quite like triceratops, with that funny-shaped frill, and two horns, not one.

 

            “Medusaceratops,” Helen said with satisfaction. “I think that fits the bill. You are lucky, Liz. First seeing that hunt, and now this. Like something out of Jurassic Park, isn’t it? Except I’m nowhere near as inept as those scientists.”

 

            Liz nodded again, and felt her jaw hanging open. She closed it with difficulty, and found she couldn’t tear her eyes from the creatures, which were massive – twice the size of the thingysaura they’d just passed, and far bulkier, with strange, purplish mottled patterns. Liz couldn’t see in great detail, since the herd was some way away; not just down the cliff, but also over by the river.  She was handed a pair of binoculars, and automatically took them and focussed in, staring at the herd, noticing the blackish mottling on the frill and the top of the creatures’ bodies, the fact that there were little ones mixed in with the group, that they clearly weren’t nervous because it wasn’t a tight configuration...

 

            “Quite aggressive, most ceratopsians,” Helen observed, and for once it sounded interesting, not imposing, not trying to sell her on something. “Steer very clear of the babies – that’s true for all animals – but the adults will charge anyway. Just run as fast as you can; they lose interest after they’ve run you off, unless you’ve harmed their young. Not much attacks a full-grown Medusaceratops, or any of the other big ones, but the babies are a different – oh, hello.”

 

            “What?” Liz said, and took the binoculars from her eyes, knowing she was probably missing the bigger picture. The herbivores had suddenly bunched up into a much tighter configuration, babies tucked in the middle, adults facing outwards with their frills and horns forming a protective circle. “Are they being hunted?”

 

            “Give the woman a gold star, and pass me the binoculars,” Helen said. “I need to see what’s hunting them, because whatever it is would probably consider us a snack, and it’s just been baulked of a meal. Nothing short of a tyrannosaur can threaten that little lot.”

 

            “And we would have noticed a T. rex.”

 

            “We would probably have noticed a T. rex. It doesn’t look that much different from up here, but see that slightly different patch of long grass? Much, much longer. Certainly tall enough to hide a tall man. And then there’s that forest they’re moving away from... Aha.”

 

            “Oh my God,” Liz said. “I know what that is!”

 

            “Share with the class, dear,” Helen said, packing away her binoculars.

 

            “Spinosaurus! It’s the largest land predator that ever lived!”

 

            “Yes, and you notice it’s not interested in us.” Helen waved the clones back a few feet, and she and Liz retreated alongside them, until they were a little more masked in the trees. “I’d love to watch the hunt, but... oh look, it’s stampeded them.”

 

            The Medusaceratops were indeed fleeing, charging across the plain as a predator twice their size burst from the forest and bore down on them.

 

            “Drat,” Helen said very mildly under the circumstances, as the Spinosaurus seized one squalling juvenile and the herd only fled faster, although the mother turned and charged the carnivore, goring it several times. “They’ve gone in exactly the direction we wanted to. And they’ll be panicked. We’ll have to be more careful.”

 

            “We would anyway, though,” Liz said, staring at the kill site and the mother, hovering on the edge of a wide perimeter as the Spinosaurus began to rip its meal to pieces. “I mean, there are so many giant predators here.”

 

            “Newsflash, Liz,” Helen said, tone absent as she frowned in thought. “Almost everything is much larger than humans. We’re small fry. I would just love to be able to find you one of the tree shrew things the palaeoanthropologists say we evolved from, but in the absence of one of those tricky little buggers… They taste nice, though, if you ever have occasion to try them –”

 

            “Do you think that counts as cannibalism?”

 

            “-a bit of a size comparison between us...” she gestured at them and the clones- “and them...” a wide gesture took in the Spinosauraus and the Medusaceratops now trudging to rejoin its herd – “will make that clear.”

 

            “I can see that much.” Liz tore her eyes from the kill and looked around her again, trying to take it all in. “Wow,” she said softly. “I mean – wow.”

 

            “It takes people like that,” Helen said quietly. “The wonder, the glory. The sheer scale.” She paused for a little while, and Liz couldn’t help luxuriating in the strangeness and newness of it all, in breathing different air that even seemed to taste different in her mouth. “You understand now, don’t you?”

 

            It was like a spell breaking, like silence ended by a shattering glass. Liz’s head snapped round, and her eyes and mind sharpened. “Understand what?”

 

            Helen seemed to realise she’d misstepped, and said nothing.

 

            “For your information,” Liz said tightly, “I don’t understand anything about what’s happened here. And I’m glad I don’t, because that means I’d understand you. And that would bring me just a little too close to being like you than I’m really comfortable with, so can we just drop it and _go_?”

 

            “Of course,” Helen said coolly, and started to give orders to the clones.

 

            They moved off in angry silence.

 

 

            Helen was annoyed with herself. She’d brought Liz to the Cretaceous specifically to impress her with the beauty of the world behind the anomalies, to involve her in it, and to see how she reacted to it. Although all of these criteria were more or less being fulfilled – Liz’s combined excitement and dismay at recognising the Spinosaurus and her fascination with the sights around her really were genuine, and Helen really was getting a chance to see her being careful, sceptical, wary and watchful, following orders without question to stay safe – she’d gone and made that stupid mistake, and had failed to seal Liz to her. She should have waited. She should have given Liz more time to let the distrust wear away. It had been a foolish, amateurish mistake, and this was far from Helen’s first go at manipulation. Liz wasn’t a credulous, easily led child; she should have remembered that, and should have remembered that – unlike Nick or Stephen – Liz had no reason to trust or like her. She had no leverage to use on the girl.

 

            At least, she thought, gearing up for a long and wary walk, there wasn’t much sun. Liz wouldn’t get new burns to match the ones that were now blistering on her face and arms. (They’d have to watch those, for infection). That would undoubtedly put her into a worse temper than ever.

 

            The Medusaceratops had collected several miles downstream, close enough to Helen’s intended camping spot to concern her, and the river was both too fast for crocodiles and too deep to ford, even considering that the night would be warm enough that wet clothes wouldn’t be lethal, only uncomfortable. Cursing to herself, she readjusted and moved them further from the river, to a spot at the foot of a rocky bluff. In the remaining daylight, she sent the clones to fetch water and to hunt, and took Liz to get firewood. The girl was stiff and formal, her eyes spitting the same kind of intractable dislike that made Lieutenant Lyle such a pleasant person to be around, and she had barely reacted when Helen pointed out pterosaurs circling on a thermal earlier, even though someone who had so clearly taken an interest in dinosaurs at some point should have been thrilled. As a diversion – or at least something to talk about – Helen showed Liz how to make a snare and set a few, although she suspected they would just be collecting them and moving on the next morning. The Cretaceous was extraordinarily dangerous, really too much so to be introducing a new traveller to, and if it hadn’t really served its purpose in dazzling Liz then there wasn’t much point hanging around. Helen had meant to move straight on to the Jurassic, but that would mean several days’ travelling over rough ground that included a very large marshy patch, and this area was obviously full of large predators at the moment. There was a much closer anomaly to the Eocene, if Helen remembered correctly; if they started early tomorrow, they could reach it well before the evening.

 

            There was a familiar deep bellow, breaking the deceptive peace of the slowly dimming light.

 

            “Tyrannosaur,” Helen translated for Liz, whose brown eyes flashed satisfyingly wide with something that wasn’t quite panic. “Quite far away, don’t worry, but let’s get back to camp.”

 

            They headed back to the spot she had chosen, laden down with wood, and found the clones waiting for them with collops of meat and some edible tubers. They’d sensibly left the carcass somewhere else, Helen noted, and hoped it was far, far away. Just in case, she checked, and they were obliging enough to agree.

 

            “Don’t keep food hanging around,” she told Liz as an aside, and started to build the fire. “It attracts unwelcome visitors.”  


            Liz nodded. “What is it?”

 

            “Don’t bother asking,” Helen said, and blew on a few small sparks that took and clung to the kindling satisfyingly quickly. “They don’t know the names.”

 

            “Well, me neither. I don’t really care about the name, I just want an idea. What did it look like?”  


            “It was a mammal,” one clone volunteered. “About a foot long.”

 

            Helen wondered if she’d been sold false goods in those clones, because she was absolutely certain that she’d been told that they didn’t come with thoughts in their head that you didn’t put there, and at no point had she told them what a mammal was. “Probably a didelphodon. Excellent work, boys. Early mammals are much more edible than dinosaurs, Liz.”

 

            With the fire going, she sat back on her heels, back to the bluff, and let the clones get on with roasting the meat, pushing the tubers into the ashes to bake, and boiling water till it was drinkable. “We’ll take watches,” she decided. “It’s much too risky to go without, here. Liz, you and I take first watch after dinner, for three hours. Then you –” she pointed at one clone- “for the next three, and you after him until dawn, understand? And at dawn, wake me.”   

 

            She set up her sleeping bag between the fire and the bluffs, on top of her own unrolled bivouac bag - it had only recently been cleaned, and if she got it dirty now she’d have to live with the smell and muck for another few months, even though it would be much too hot to sleep inside the actual bag. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Liz watch her intently and then copy her. There was no talk, no enquiries about survival or about the likelihood of their camp being investigated in the night of the kind that Helen might have expected – might have hoped for, even. Just because Nick had so conspicuously loved teaching didn’t mean he was the only one; Helen quite liked having a bright student around to ask clever questions, and she had specifically chosen Liz because she was teachable.

 

            Helen bit back a sigh, and forced more self-recrimination out of her mind. It was going to be a very long three hours.


	7. Chapter 7

            Liz was awake before Helen poked her; she changed her bra, pants and shirt more to feel as if she was doing something meaningful in the name of cleanliness than anything else, and shook her boots out before putting them back on, rolling up her sleeping bag and bivouac bag and repacking her rucksack. Helen was drinking some of the water they’d boiled last night, and cold left-over roast tuber. Liz followed her lead, grimacing at the bland taste and texture of the stuff – this place was an affront to her cook’s sensibilities – but nonetheless finishing it off. She splashed her face and rinsed her hands with the last of the water, feeling a bit stale and dirty, and then looked at Helen.

 

            “Plans?” she said, and heard the echo of a nightmare in her voice. _Orders?_ said a future Liz in just the same tone, blank-eyed and hopeless with nowhere else to go -

 

            “We’re heading for the Eocene,” Helen said. “I anticipate about a day’s walk, possibly more; it depends on how careful we have to be. The anomaly is back the way we came, unfortunately, but that can’t be helped.”

 

            Liz nodded, and the phantom disappeared. She thought Helen had brought her here to try to make some kind of impression on her, to make her think that it was worth buying what Helen was selling, and while the Cretaceous was spectacular – even more beautiful under the delicate tint of an early dawn, Liz thought – Helen had miscalculated. She’d let Liz see her strategy instead of reeling her in slowly, and it had backfired, or just been executed too quickly. The risks of dragging a self-aware, rebellious captive through the Cretaceous were evidently outweighing the possible benefits of the vibrant landscape and awe-inspiring wildlife.

 

            “Do we need to worry about the Spinosaurus?”

 

            “Yes,” Helen said. “It’s probably still in the area and will probably hunt opportunistically if it sees us. A big creature like that needs to feed regularly. On the plus side, the Medusaceratops herd will probably have calmed down.”

 

            “What about the tyrannosaur we heard last night?” Liz asked, watching as the clones packed bowls away and kicked apart the glowing embers of the fire. She’d heard that same bellowing when she was on watch with Helen and had been frightened, her fingers curling around the multi-tool – the only weapon available to her, since Helen hadn’t given her a knife like her own. She’d heard it again several hours after she’d fallen asleep, and had woken almost panicked, sitting bolt upright to see a clone standing on the edge of the ring of firelight, watching the darkness. It had been fainter then, though, and Helen had barely twitched, so she had slowly subsided and gone back to sleep.

 

            Helen nodded. “Worth watching out for, although this area can’t accommodate too many apex predators, so they’ll probably move off.”

 

            The clones signalled to Helen that they were ready to move out, and Helen got up and stretched with a sigh. Liz shouldered her rucksack.

 

            “Let’s go, Liz. Another bright day of adventure ahead of us.”

 

            Liz made a rude noise.

 

 

            The Cretaceous was no longer as exciting as it had been in Liz’s first few hours there; the fact that she was clearly being wowed with prehistory had worn the shine off very quickly. The journey to the Eocene took two days in the end, not one, because the creatures in their path slowed them down and because even though the greater predators were diurnal, travelling at night with limited human senses was too dangerous to countenance. The Spinosaurus had made another kill some time in the night, but had not eaten all of it before abandoning it to scavengers, smaller raptors that showed too much interest in them for Helen _or_ Liz’s liking, and had to be frightened off with shots from the clones.

 

            “I don’t carry a gun as a rule,” Helen told Liz matter-of-factly, as they were moving away from the kill at speed and skirting the panicked herd of leaellynasaura it had come from – a slow and difficult task, because they were in an area of quite dense forest.

 

            “So what would you have done then?” Liz enquired in an undertone, freezing as a leaellynasaura appeared, far closer than she had expected it to.

 

            “Backed away. Thrown rocks. Skirted the kill much more carefully.” Helen shook her head. “Modern weapons are a luxury. You’ll learn to manage without.”

 

            Liz thought of the firepower the ARC had at its disposal with a certain degree of longing, and continued sneaking past the herd of frightened herbivores.

 

           

            That night, Helen set Liz to watch alone. Creatures came, drawn to the campfire’s light, and Liz prodded Helen with a toe and set to throwing the small collection of rounded pebbles she’d gathered during her sleepless hours at them. Some of her throws, with the power of fear and a practised wrist, connected; she got a few in their moon-like, glowing eyes, which led to some chittering and the group of creatures scattering, helped by Helen poking the fire up and waving lighted sticks in their faces. Whatever they were, and even Helen didn’t attempt to identify them in the dark, they reminded Liz strongly of the troodontids she’d encountered years before, and when she slept she had nightmares.

 

            Helen shook her awake gently, and for a moment it felt like her dad’s hand or Jon’s on her shoulder, rousing her from yet another bad dream, and she sobbed and curled into it instinctively.

 

            She spent the entire next day beating herself up for that.

 

 

            They came to the Eocene anomaly mid-afternoon; Helen had pushed them hard all day, although Liz honestly wasn’t sure why until they got there and Helen consulted some kind of small, hand-held machine and snapped “Through, through – quick, it’s weakening!”, and she and the clones both dived through at once.

 

            Liz hung back a second. She could stop. She could wait. She could accidentally-on-purpose leave Helen behind and somehow retrace her steps to the modern day – it couldn’t be that hard, through the Cretaceous, then the Devonian, then the Permian and then home. If she’d done it with Helen, there was no reason why she couldn’t do it alone...

 

            Except for the, you know, giant predators. Liz either needed Helen’s in-depth knowledge of the anomalies or the clones’ guns to protect herself from those, and she had neither. If this closed and she was on the wrong side –

 

            It flickered and Liz ran and it collapsed behind her.

 

            “Having second thoughts?” Helen said rather snidely, consulting what looked interestingly like a bog-standard Ordnance Survey map with odd extra markings on it and the same hand-held thing she’d been looking at before, but which she tucked away before Liz could really see it.

 

            “No,” Liz said tartly. “Second thoughts were like two days ago. We’re on twelfth thoughts now. I’m going for the Golden Jubilee of thoughts by the end of today.”

 

            Helen snorted. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose a limb, that’s all.”

 

            “Whatever,” Liz said flippantly, storing up the information that a closing anomaly cut bits off you for later reference (or possibly later terrible warning, depending) and got a glower from a clone.

 

            Jesus. Those guys really didn’t like her, did they.

 

 

            It was possible Liz was biased, but the Eocene didn’t strike her as anything particularly special, not compared to the Cretaceous. It lacked the vibrancy and colour of the other time period, and seemed distressingly normal, with woodland rather than tropical forest, and more open plains. Liz pointed this out to Helen, who said merely: “Giant predatory birds.”

 

            “What? Where?” Liz said, glancing up into the sky.

 

            “Giant predatory flightless birds. They were an early Eocene phenomenon, I wouldn’t worry,” Helen said, filling her pockets with fruit that Liz thought looked like the weird stuff you found in particularly batty health food shops. Liz copied her anyway.

 

            Helen stopped, and frowned up into the sky. Liz nearly bumped into her. “It’s later here,” Helen announced. “We should start looking out for a campsite. And then... hm.”

 

            “Okay, it’s obvious you’ve got something on your mind,” Liz said, “and you know something, a second in command needs to know about these things.”

 

            “Not at your stage of training, you don’t,” Helen answered, and Liz almost smirked to see a tightness in her jaw that suggested Liz was getting to her.

 

            “What is it? Are you like, late for an appointment or something? Late, late for a very important date or whatever? But you travel through time, you could just – _hey, you, watch it_.” Liz turned and glared at the clone who had deliberately thumped her in the back, and it returned a bland, flat look that made her shiver and reach for her multi-tool and wish it was a proper-sized knife.

 

            Helen turned sharply. “What’s going on?”

 

            “It hit me,” Liz said.

 

            “Accident, Lady,” the clone said to Helen. “Accident. Sorry.”

 

            Helen’s gaze drifted suspiciously over both Liz and the clone, and then she turned back.

 

            Liz treated the clone to another glare – which it returned, with interest, and Liz wasn’t going to pretend that that didn’t creep her out – and went back to following Helen onto a large open plain, as they left the woodland they’d just been in.

 

            “To answer your question,” Helen said abruptly, “no, I can’t just hop back and forth. It’s not that easy. Anomalies work on a time scale of years at the very least and they often don’t open to the same time period, unless they’re very, very stable indeed – and only a few are that stable, which is why I’m so selective about where I keep my home bases. I disappeared in 1998, yes? That was an accident. The closest I could get, for six years, was 2010. Of course, I’ve since made it back to 1999, but that’s a matter of practice and technology.”

 

            “The handheld thingy you were playing with?”

 

            Helen rolled her eyes. “Yes, Liz, the handheld thingy.”

 

            “Can I see?”

 

            “Not yet.” Helen froze, and raised a hand sharply.

 

            Liz caught what she’d seen immediately: some kind of large creature, much bigger than a wolf but with a wolf-like snout, only patterned like a hyena, with a hyena’s hackles and impressive teeth. Smaller than the dinosaurs Liz had seen over the previous days, but still taller than Lyle at the shoulder, it had its nose up, testing the wind, and as they slowly retreated back into the woodland cover Liz realised that they were upwind of it, the soft breeze carrying their scent to it and adrenaline shot through her system. She wished desperately for some way of defending herself, a gun she knew how to handle, even the stick she’d had on the Duke of Edinburgh expedition or the glorified weedkiller at the school anomaly where she’d met Helen, the thin metal tube that had at least had a gas flame flickering on its end. She looked about, and saw nothing, not even the pebbles she’d thrown at their unwanted visitors last night, which she knew would have less than no effect on something that large. And she herself had nothing more than a multi-tool.

 

            Why hadn’t Helen given her a knife? Liz asked herself, and common sense answered: because she knew you’d stab her. Liz was forced to concede that common sense had a point, but right now it seemed distinctly outweighed by the fact that, if she hung around in dangerous environments like these without a proper weapon, she’d be dead very soon.

 

            The clones moved to the front of the group, and Helen shifted backwards and turned her head slightly to speak softly to Liz, her eyes still fixed on the creature. “Andrewsarchus. It’s not very fast, but if it gets to us, we’re toast. It may not be interested in us – we’re well before the extinction event, prey is still – _down_.”

 

            Obeying orders, Liz dropped to the ground beside Helen, crouched behind a large bush; the clones took up similar positions, attention darting between the Andrewsarchus in the distance and whatever had Helen so excited now.

 

            It rustled out of the woodlands not twenty metres from them, the largest and ugliest warthog Liz had ever seen. Liz was tempted to laugh, but then noted the tusks and remembered that pigs were omnivores, and that this one was bigger than modern big cats. It wandered out onto the plain, grunting, and Liz saw the Andrewsarchus take an interest. It couldn’t – surely? Liz knew she was a poor judge of comparative size at this distance, but the Andrewsarchus didn’t look much smaller than the giant warthog.

 

            The giant warthog had also seen the Andrewsarchus. It grunted, more like a roar than a grunt, and pawed at the ground with hooves the size of plates.

 

            “Back up,” Helen hissed, “ _slowly_.”

 

            Obedient to instructions, Liz slid slowly back, relying on the continuous cover of the undergrowth. She could just about hear and feel Helen moving behind her, could see the clones inching away from their positions closer to the giant warthog, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from what looked like a developing stand-off, or not even a stand-off – the giant warthog charged the Andrewsarchus, and the Andrewsarchus evidently fancied its chances because it charged right back, and –

 

            “Get up and _run_ ,” Helen snapped, “they’re not interested in us any more,” and almost before Helen could finish her sentence Liz was up and sprinting alongside her, running as far away from the developing fight, squeals and roars and the sound of tearing flesh, as they could get. Helen seemed to have a definite plan in mind, leading them deep into the woodland but then round in a loop as if, even running for her life, she had a definite objective. Liz was forced to slow a little, or lose Helen; two years ago Helen had outrun her by a slight margin, but that was then, and Liz was now much faster and much stronger. She thought the clones could probably catch her, what with the heavy rucksack, but didn’t want to have to put it to the test.

 

            Helen came to a stop after a while, and grabbed Liz by the webbing on her rucksack to slow her down. “Okay. Okay,” she said, between gasps of air, “far enough.”

 

            Liz crashed to a halt herself, and sucked in a huge lungful of air. She was used to running much further than this, but she never had such an incentive, and she was shaking with adrenaline.

 

            Helen, who was now scanning their surrounding carefully, eyed her. “Sit down before you crash. It’s called adrenaline fatigue.”

 

            Liz collapsed onto the woodland floor, resting her back against a tree-trunk, and nodded. The clones looked almost untouched, even though they’d run as far as and as fast as Helen and Liz had, and Liz wondered if they were genetically modified. “What were those things?”

 

            “I told you what the Andrewsarchus was. The other thing was an entelodon, I suspect; certainly some kind of entelodont.” (Liz wondered what the difference was). “A young male, I think. They’re omniovores, big predators; they’ll rule the grasslands in the Miocene. But it was up against its match, facing an Andrewsarchus.”

 

            “Why?”

 

            Helen shrugged, sliding down to sit on the ground as well. “Maybe the entelodon thought the Andrewsarchus was competition, and the Andrewsarchus thought the entelodon was lunch.”

 

            Liz stretched out her legs absently. “How far have we gone out of our way?”

 

            Helen hummed. “Not that far, I don’t think. We’ll have to avoid the plain as completely as possible, and we’ve certainly gone a very roundabout way, but it’s not too bad.” She got up, and held out a hand to Liz, who eyed it with suspicion but eventually accepted it. “We should keep moving.”

 

           

            They made camp a few hours later, and Helen sent the clones hunting again and put Liz to peeling and de-seeding the fruits they’d both picked up and cooking them in a little water over the campfire, so that they reduced down to some sort of soft plum-red jam-like thing.

 

            “Seriously, what are these?” Liz said, poking the mixture with the end of her utensil.

 

            “I don’t know the modern name,” Helen said, “or if there’s a modern name.” She shrugged. “I just call them fruit.”

 

            Liz tasted a bit of the mixture, and found it sharp and a little sour. She wished instinctively for a bit of sugar or caramel, something that would complement it, and then told herself off for wanting to fix something that would get her the Vitamin C she needed. It might not taste nice, but it was good for her. “Why do you cook them? Aren’t they less good for you that way?”

 

            “They taste better, though,” Helen said absently, and did not glance up from her work as the clones reappeared with something that looked worryingly like a couple of whole squirrels and started to roast them over the campfire. Liz pulled a face. The last time she’d seen anything so gruesome, it had been whole skinned rabbits at a butcher’s.

 

            She took the fruit off the fire, in order to keep it away from the cooking meat, and looked over at Helen. The other woman had been busy almost since they’d chosen a campsite; she’d helped Liz bring water in the folding bucket thing one of the clones kept, but otherwise had left Liz to her own devices. Liz had built the campfire without being told, and had lit it on her first go, which had given her a slight pang as she thought of how smug she could have been at home, and how Jon would have been pleased with her. Helen had barely lifted her nose from the map she had pulled out, or from the black hand-held device she still wouldn’t show Liz, and she’d taken out a small leather-bound notebook Liz had never seen before and was flipping between its pages, and the hand-held device, and the map.

 

            “Curiosity killed the cat,” Helen said, nose in her book and squinting at it. It was now almost completely dark, and although the fire was bright – and burnt considerably better than yesterday’s, the wood being less damp – it was no substitute for daylight.

 

            “You could use a torch, you know,” Liz said, without deigning to respond to Helen’s actual statement.

 

            “Need to save the battery,” Helen said.

 

            “You need to save your eyes, too,” Liz pointed out, and slumped backwards, against a convenient tree.

 

            Helen said nothing in reply, and Liz found herself forced to wait in silence, bored and tired, while the clones stared hostilely at her and the food cooked. She tried to close her eyes to get a little sleep, at least, but the clones’ glowering drilled into her and made her too anxious to keep her eyes shut; she was definitely going to have to watch them carefully.

 

            Did anyone around this campfire trust the others? she wondered. The clones might trust Helen, but Liz wasn’t sure that Helen trusted the clones. She didn’t trust Helen or the clones, and she’d made that perfectly clear to both of them. And now Helen seemed to be making it clear that she didn’t trust Liz, and Liz hadn’t anticipated that.

 

            It would make matters harder, of course, if Helen was watching her with suspicion; it would be harder to get a sense of what she’d need to survive behind the anomalies alone, to collect anything she might require, and then to find her way out and go. She would try anyway, of course, but it would take longer.

 

            Liz bit her lip, drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, staring without seeing into the fire and the hiss and crackle of the cooking meat. The first order of business was obviously getting a closer look at that map and the gadget Helen was already fiddling with, but somehow dealing with the clones’ mistrust was also high priority. Liz was prepared to bet that in a straight fight she could beat Helen, or disable her long enough to run from her. She knew from experience that the same wasn’t true of the clones.

 

            “Penny for them,” Helen said, sounding more ready to be interested and amused than she had done all day.

 

            Liz turned her head to meet her eyes. The gadget had been put away; so had the notebook and the map. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she said, and softened it with a smile.

 

            Helen laughed.


	8. Chapter 8

            Helen had a definite plan, Liz thought, following her along the edge of a river they’d had to walk several miles to find. It bore little resemblance to those they’d seen in the Cretaceous or the Devonian, but Liz was convinced it was somehow related to them – she’d whiled away several dull hours and calmed her nerves in the face of unearthly noises from the night by trying to guess how. She wasn’t sure, however, that Geography AS-Level had equipped her with the right tools to work it out.

 

            “Are we following the river?” she asked Helen, chasing the vague possibility on the grounds that she had no other ideas for finding out what they were doing, and no clues other than the fact that Helen was walking with extreme purpose, and without consulting the map at all.

 

            “Today we are,” Helen said, which was... slightly unhelpful. In fact, it was very unhelpful. It told Liz exactly nothing about where they were going.

 

            “It’s not the Thames, is it? Like, the past Thames?”

 

            “I don’t think so, no,” Helen answered.

 

            “But there’s a definite place we’re going to that you have in mind?”

 

            “Yes. Stop fishing.”

 

            Liz sniffed to show she was offended and fell silent.

 

            They spent longer in the Eocene than Liz had done in any other time period; about three days altogether, Liz calculated, although unlike before they weren’t slowed down or forced to detour by anything more exciting than a browsing and totally docile herd of Embolotherium. It was increasingly hard to keep track of time and Helen had warned Liz that she was now experiencing time differently to any of her friends or family living in their own timeline, time passing at a normal rate for them while Liz hopped between time periods. The time she spent in a place wouldn’t register for her family, Helen had said. All they would know was the time between her leaving and their seeing her next. It might be a hundred years, and Liz would be no more than seventeen; or it might be two, and Liz well into her thirties.

           

            Liz spared a moment to be terrified at the prospect of spending her life with Helen, and then dragged herself back to the more immediate problem: where were they going, and _why_?

 

            At the end of the third day, just as dusk was falling and Liz was beginning to think seriously about pointing out to Helen that they needed to set up camp, because the clones clearly weren’t going to do it, they came to an open anomaly.

 

            “Through, boys,” Helen said, and the clones went through.

 

            Liz looked at Helen. “What are they? Bait, or an advance guard?”

 

            Helen just smiled thinly. “You’re going to hate me for this.”

 

            Liz’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Hate you for what?”

 

            “With me,” Helen said, and stepped through.

 

            Liz followed her warily. “Oh my God,” she said involuntarily when she reached the other side, “you didn’t.”

 

            “Welcome to the Jurassic, Liz,” Helen said.

 

            The Jurassic. Maybe the next most dangerous period, after the Cretaceous – perhaps even ranking higher than the Cretaceous, Liz knew too little about dinosaurs to guess. And Liz was already tired, and it was bright, broad daylight.

 

            “You’ve got to be kidding, Helen, we have to rest some time.”

 

            “Yes. But not yet.” Helen smiled, though Liz thought she saw a little strain on her face. There was no way Helen considered this ideal. “I know what you’re made of, Liz Lester. You can handle it. Let’s go.”

 

 

            Tired, wary, and quite frankly scared of navigating such a place when she wasn’t at her best, the Jurassic left less of an impression on Liz. It lacked the colour of the Cretaceous and the strange half-familiarity of the Eocene, and they walked for a long time without encountering any of the big-name dinosaurs that had stunned and excited Liz in the Cretaceous. She regained some wonder when they were forced to give a grumpy solitary male stegosaurus a very wide berth, sneaking glances at its rusty-coloured back plates with a kind of I-can’t-believe-I’m-seeing-this awe, but otherwise remained on high alert, tightly strung and thrumming with exhaustion. She had struggled to sleep properly, still ill at ease in the past, and limited meals, heavy physical exertion and the constant nagging anxiety of homesickness and her status as prey were getting to her. She couldn’t help doubts as to whether she would ever make it home, or whether she was kidding herself even hoping that that was a possibility.

 

            The weather was hot, humid and thick with a static charge; rolling thunder proclaimed the arrival of a storm, and when it finally began they were all quickly soaked to the skin. Grey sheets of rain poured steadily down, wrecking visibility, and Helen almost led them straight into a herd of what sounded suspiciously like bracken-sauruses to Liz. Luckily, the giant dinosaurs – Liz glimpsed brown, tree trunk-sized legs, and gaped a little – seemed as placid as the Embolotherium herd had been, and they navigated the edge of the herd without too much difficulty.

 

            They came to a stream, and Helen’s curses told Liz both that she had expected it to be there and that she had not expected it to have broken its banks. They crossed it, the clones seemingly having little trouble with the currents ripping at their ankles, and the humans hanging on to the clones to make it across. Liz didn’t want to have to rely on them, and was almost certain the clone that Helen had ordered to help her would have dumped her in the stream if given its own way, but she was glad to have had help and to have made it across. She could probably have done it on her own without being more than half drowned – but she wouldn’t have liked to test the hypothesis.

 

            There was a roar in the distance, and they all froze, and then a trumpeting bellow of distress and another roar.

 

            “Hunt in progress,” Helen shouted over the rain. “Probably not a danger to us. Come on, we don’t want to find out the hard way that it is!”

 

            Liz shook her head vigorously, sending drops of water flying everywhere – not that you could tell, given the current downpour – and followed Helen, who led them to the foot of the rocky bluff and cast around until she found a large overhang. A quick flash of the torch established that there was nothing more exciting there than something small and ratlike, easily chased away, and they all huddled underneath it. The clones had to struggle to fit; Helen and Liz, who were smaller, were quite comfortable, but very wet.

 

            “We stick it out till dawn,” Helen said loudly. “The next anomaly’s only an hour away from here, but there’s no way the storm will let up before nightfall. Don’t worry about your wet clothes, Liz –” Liz was fruitlessly trying to wring out her shirt without taking it off – “it’s so warm here we shouldn’t have trouble, not if we stick together.”

 

            “Huddle for warmth?” Liz said with distaste, and Helen’s teeth flashed bright in the darkness. 

 

            “Yes.”

 

            Liz slept even more poorly than usual. She wasn’t cold – it was far too hot, even with the cooling influence of the rain, and Helen and the clones were packed in close beside her – but she was far too wet for her liking, and not just the sensation but the thought of it nagged at her. Jon would thoroughly disapprove of her getting so wet and letting herself stay so wet in a survival situation; it would be far too easy to freeze to death like this. But he wasn’t here, it was bloody tropical here (Liz jerked awake and slapped a mosquito - she had plenty of bites already, thanks), and there was no wood that would light for a fire and she had no blanket or towel to dry herself off with. There were no formal watches set, too, and although the clones were very obviously keeping an eye out, Liz was still uneasy, flickering awake at every new crash of sound, her multi-tool tucked into her hand, every bit of her wishing it was a proper knife even though she knew that the giants that preyed on creatures here wouldn’t be put off by a knife the size of one of their teeth. She drifted into sleep determined to remain upright and dignified, but unable to stop herself being frightened and mistrusting.

 

            She still woke to cleaner, cooler air with her head on Helen’s shoulder, which drew a cry of disgust from her even as she recoiled upright and glowered at one of the clones for the nasty smile on its face.

 

            “You’re awake. Good,” Helen said briskly. “Tired? Damp? Hungry?”

 

            “All three,” Liz said crossly.

 

            Helen grinned, and got up, stooping, before stepping out from under the overhang. “Don’t worry. In an hour’s time we’ll be in a new time period, and you’ll like this one, Liz.”

 

            Liz gave her a very suspicious stare. “Will I?”

 

            “Yes.” Helen smiled a catlike smile. “Come on, now, not far.”

 

            Liz growled – she hadn’t eaten for a full day, not counting the snack Helen had given her before the storm broke, casually stripping nuts from trees and offering them to her, and the strange, catnapping sleep she’d had was not what she was used to and made her feel more tired than she had been before she went to sleep. Still, she followed Helen.

 

            Maybe it was because she felt so awful that she was the one who noticed, some time later, that she and Helen and the clones were being followed in their turn. “Helen,” she whispered, too scared to speak louder, “there’s something...”

 

            Helen glanced round, and caught sight of the shadow Liz had taken ten minutes to get into perspective within seconds. “Shit,” she hissed. “Allosaurus. Keep walking steadily, it may decide we’re not what it wants for breakfast...”

 

            They kept walking, and the shadow drew closer; Liz saw a creature that was almost tyrannosaur-like, but far smaller, with a similar-shaped head and similar small forearms. Then, relatively close at hand, she saw the anomaly, glittering in the distance, and her own relief took her by surprise. She looked at Helen to see what would happen now, and saw that Helen’s head was whipping back and forth between the rapidly-approaching allosaurus and the anomaly, and then the allosaurus’s muscles bunched and it sprang forward, Liz could see it too –

 

            “Run!” Helen screamed, but Liz had already burst into a flat sprint, ducking and weaving around trees and low bushes as much as she could, but otherwise headed for the anomaly by the fastest route possible. She heard the allosaurus roar and give chase, but she didn’t dare turn her head and look, and the anomaly was getting closer, so much closer, and she couldn’t feel the pain in her abused calf muscles that was strange and she heard a scream but it wasn’t Helen and she didn’t care anyway and –

 

            she was through.

 

            Liz tripped and fell full length on tarmac - tarmac? - and was startled by a soft humming sound - humming sound? – coming from somewhere close by. She leapt up, frantic in case the allosaurus should follow them, and Helen and the last clone crashed to a stop beside her.

 

            “Where are we?” Liz demanded.

 

            Helen was still gasping for breath, but she managed her trademark crooked smile (Liz could get to hate the sight of that thing, really she could). “Welcome to the future, Liz.”

 

            “What?” Liz said, baffled, too high on adrenaline to really look around her, but aware that she was in what felt like the basement of a derelict multi-storey car park. “And shouldn’t we move away from the...” she indicated the anomaly.

 

            “Oh, yes.” Helen moved off, walking more slowly and more stiffly now.

 

Liz jogged to catch up with her. “Where’s the other clone?” she asked, although she had a horrible feeling she already knew.

 

“Dead,” Helen said, with only a slight tightening of her jaw to show that she cared at all. “The allosaurus caught him.”

 

Liz stared. “And you aren’t... upset about that, or anything?”

 

“No, Liz, of course not.” Helen shrugged, and Liz cast an appalled glance back at the remaining clone, who was as stone-faced as ever, nothing about it to show that it could hear what was being said. “They’re expendable; there are more where they come from. Better one of them is eaten rather than one of us.”  


“Well, yeah, but... Helen, you made these things. Shouldn’t you be more – I don’t know, upset?”

 

Helen pressed her hand to a suspiciously new-looking shiny black pad beside a heavy, battered metal door, and it lit up, red light playing around Helen’s fingers. There was a small, friendly beep, and the door’s lock released with an audible clunk. Helen pushed it open, and Liz followed her through, holding it open for the clone as well out of guilt.

 

“Why would I be upset?” Helen demanded, climbing the concrete stairs thus revealed. “This is what they’re for, Liz. They’re companions, in a sense. Protectors. Minions, if you like. What they _aren’t_ is human.”

 

“But you always call them ‘he’,” Liz said uncertainly. “I’m the one that says ‘it’.”

 

“I’d noticed that,” Helen said, as they came out onto the thin strip of waste ground surrounding the multi-storey car park. Helen walked straight up to the chain-link fence and clambered over, not without a few winces and muttered curses; Liz got over much more easily, although a very loud stomach rumble just as she was swinging her leg over the top both reminded her that she needed to eat and nearly caused her to lose her grip. The clone, of course, had no trouble. Liz was feeling less guilty for thinking of it as an ‘it’ by the moment, although she did wonder if it remembered its fellow clone, and if it was sad that the other was gone.

 

“Where are we going?” Liz said. They’d come out onto a back street, and although Liz knew she was in a city – and a weirdly advanced one, going by the ever-present and very high-tech CCTV cameras – she had no idea which one. “Hell, where are we?”

 

“Cardiff,” Helen said with a flourish of the hands, as they came out onto a large and prosperous-looking main street. Glossy cars purred past though there was no scent of exhaust fumes, several inches off the ground and short of a driver; pedestrians wearing weird clothes that would nonetheless have fitted right in at any Noughties fashion show strolled past, most hooked up to electronic gadgets, and 3D video advertisements flashed in shop windows. Liz asked herself, a little hysterically, what a Tesco’s would look like in this time.

 

“Twenty-third century. The capital city of the British Federal State.”

 

“Huh?” Liz said, stunned.

 

“The Thames floods now,” Helen explained. “Far too dodgy, having the city there. And then there was a slight accident with Heathrow, and let’s not forget the bomb at London City, shall we? That was a mess. For the past hundred years, at least in this timeline, Cardiff has been the most prosperous city in the UK. Although UK is rather outdated, as a term of reference.” She gave Liz a critical look, and then glanced down herself in much the same way. “We’re both a mess. What would you say to a hot bath?”

 

“A...?”

 

Helen rolled her eyes. “Showing all the intelligence and shrewdness I chose you for, Liz, aren’t you?”

 

Liz just looked at her.

 

“I have a friend who lives near here. His name is Simon Eaglescroft. He knows my true name, but here I prefer to use the pseudonym Kaye Cooke.” Helen got Liz by the ear, as if to force her attention.

 

“Ow, get the fuck off,” Liz snapped, batting Helen’s hand away and glowering, her eyes far less glassy now.

 

“My name is Kaye Cooke,” Helen said slowly and clearly. “And if anyone asks, you’re my niece, Melissa.”

 

“ _Melissa_?” Liz exclaimed, revolted.

 

“Melissa,” Helen said firmly.

 

“God,” Liz said, dispirited.

 

“Have it your own way.” Helen started out into the stream of pedestrian traffic and Liz wearily tried to keep pace with her. The older woman was flagging as much as she was, Liz could tell that much, but she at least had something to keep her going – the knowledge of a goal, the understanding of where she was, something Liz didn’t. Liz didn’t want to be here, would have given anything to open a door and be at home, and it showed in her increasing desire to just stop and sit down.

 

Finally, just as Liz was about to vocalise this wish, Helen drew her off the main thoroughfare into a residential street of tall buildings, half red brick, half steel cladding, with large windows that shimmered in varying degrees of opacity, as if the residents were controlling their light and privacy without curtains. She stopped at one of the large doors, mixed wood and steel in the same style, which Liz was beginning to snidely refer to as post-modern collage inside her head. This one, Liz noted dazedly, had a large number 13, and the small pod-like black camera above the doorway buzzed as it shifted and focussed on them.

 

Helen pressed the bell, and an intercom fuzzed open. “Simon darling,” she purred. “I’ve come for a visit.”

 

 _Simon?_ Liz thought, and for a moment imagined her best friend Simon Price standing behind this door, pale eyes as knowing as ever, brown hair flopping down into his face, dressed in skinny jeans and semi-permanent swagger. Then she realised it couldn’t be, and felt her shoulders slump and wholly involuntary tears prick at her eyes for a moment. If she could just not be alone, if she could have someone she trusted with her, that would help. That would help so much.

 

The door swung open, and Liz stumbled forwards into a hallway that seemed all whiteness, brightness and glass. A man in an immaculate three-piece suit strode forward. “Helen. Such a treat. And you’ve brought a friend, and one of your companions.”

 

“Yes. Liz here is feeling a little unwell, I’m afraid; I’ve pushed her a bit hard for her first few weeks behind the anomalies, but you know how it is, Simon, you only really understand these things if you experience the wonder and the fear early on, and the anomalies aren’t what you could call predictable.” Helen managed a dazzling smile.

 

“Excuse me,” Liz volunteered, feeling her eyes cross of their own accord, “but... I don’t want to be rude or anything and it’s really nice to meet you, um, Simon, but I might faint if I don’t sit down.”

 

Helen’s hands were on her shoulders, pushing her down. “I think she could do with a little sleep. And a bath. I myself feel much the same, of course, but if you want a progress report immediately, I’m sure I could oblige you...”

 

Someone offered a hand to Liz. “Just come with me, miss.”

 

“Liz,” Liz insisted, but allowed the person to pull her to her feet. She realised, wobbling rather and unfocussed, that she was looking down at a girl only a few years older than her, a platinum blonde with kind eyes. “Who’re you?”

 

“My name’s Jermyn. Come with me, I’ll take you to your room.”

 

“German?” Liz said, baffled, but obediently stumbled after her. “You sound Welsh to me.”

 

The girl laughed. “Jermyn – J E R M Y N. You’re funny. Mrs Cutter never brings funny guests.”

 

“Thank you?” Liz said, rather uncertainly, adding, “I’m not sure I’m a guest of Mrs Cutter’s, exactly.” But Jermyn seemed to have everything under control, and all things considered, Liz thought Jermyn had better have things as she wanted them.


	9. Chapter 9

 

Given this amiable resolve, it came as a great shock to Liz to drift vaguely up through the soft clouds of sleep and realise that she had someone warm and soft tucked under her arm. A faint glimpse of soft blonde hair made Liz think _of course – Juliet_ , but then she woke up all the way and her memories of the past week were dumped on her like a bucket of cold water, and she screamed in shock and promptly fell out of bed.

 

“Well,” Jermyn said in mild confusion, sitting up, “that was explosive.” 

 

            Liz was extremely thankful to realise that Jermyn was wearing a shirt at the very least, and that she was fully dressed in soft slate-blue pyjamas she distinctly remembered dressing herself in, after a long hot bath in which she had very nearly fallen asleep. “I wasn’t expecting...”

 

            “No,” Jermyn said, eyeing her with interest. “You made that much clear.”

 

            “Um. Why did you... climb into bed with me? I didn’t hit on you or anything?”

 

            “No.” Jermyn thoughtfully combed her short hair out of her face (and now that Liz had a look at her, she could see that the blonde hair was paler, that Jermyn’s eyes were dark, that she had curves where Juliet didn’t, and castigated herself for ever having thought – she blushed furiously). “You had a nightmare. You seemed to quieten down when I talked to you, but every time I tried to get up you twitched and I thought you might start screaming again. And you need to sleep.” She slid out of bed and stood up. “Mrs Cutter’s guests always look like they’ve fallen under a hoverbus. You’re no exception.”

 

            “Thank you,” Liz said, both nettled and disconcerted.

 

            “Who’s Juliet, by the way?” Jermyn pressed a button on the wall, and the large square of black glass set in the wall rapidly lightened to show a view of city roofs and a small balcony with large pot-plants on. The sun was shining weakly. “You kept saying her name.”

 

            “My girlfriend,” Liz answered, “who usually gets to deal with me when I have nightmares.” She realised that she was still lounging awkwardly on the floor, and straightened and sat cross-legged to force some respectability into the proceedings. “I’m really, really sorry, Jermyn. And, you know, thank you. But even if Helen told you to look after me in, um, _every_ way-” the blush got significantly worse – “I would really prefer it if you didn’t. In future, just leave me to my nightmares. I can deal with it.”

 

            Jermyn raised her eyebrows at her. “Worried about Juliet?”

 

            “That,” Liz said, feeling she could trust her legs again, and therefore climbing to her feet, “and. Well. I find this embarrassing. And don’t get me wrong, Jermyn, you’re really pretty, but... I’m sort of property of Juliet, if you know what I mean.”

 

            “I can see that.” Jermyn gave Liz a maternal smile, which Liz tried very hard not to resent. “And don’t get me wrong, Liz, you’re very attractive, but I’m straight, and not so desperate for a job that I have to do everything Mrs Cutter says.”  


            Liz suffered a recurrence of the blush. “Sorry.”

 

            “It’s really nothing.” Jermyn moved away from the window, and flung open a wardrobe set into the walls, which were painted a very pale blue. “Clothes are here. Mrs Cutter apparently told Mr Eaglescroft your size; most of these things are new. The bathroom’s through that door.” She pointed to an en-suite. “I told you how everything worked last night. Do you remember?”

 

            “No,” Liz said, and went for absolute bluntness, “but I’d rather work it out on my own, thanks.”

 

            Jermyn sighed, and gave Liz a sly smile. “I liked you better when you were all tired and pliant. You look very sweet when you sleep.”

 

             Liz came to the conclusion that, until Jermyn went away, she wasn’t going to stop blushing. “I’m going to take that as the compliment it wasn’t.”

 

            “Still funny,” Jermyn said approvingly. “That’s good.”

 

            Liz felt every word like a verbal pat on the head, and winced. She would be avoiding Jermyn in future. “Jermyn...”

 

            “I’ll go away and leave you to get settled,” Jermyn said kindly.

 

            Liz was very glad to be able to shut the door behind her.

 

 

            The future didn’t appear to have done anything specially outlandish with clothing, going on the selection in front of her; she glanced out of the window again and chose a pair of immaculate skinny jeans and a pale grey high-necked top that, for some reason, had a hood but no sleeves, and a neon blue zip that was only a couple of centimetres long and therefore functionally useless, except possibly to show off cleavage Liz didn’t have. To Liz’s astonishment, there was a pair of bright blue Converses tucked into the floor of the wardrobe. She fished them out, found a pair of socks, and put those on as well.

 

            She wandered into the bathroom, and found enough things to be able to wash her face, brush her teeth, and comb out her hair, which she apparently hadn’t bothered to tie up before sleeping. Her much-abused hairtie – and a small packet of fresh ones – sat beneath the mirror. She chose a fresh one, and tied her hair into a high ponytail, and then examined herself.

 

            She looked tired; that more than anything bore out Jermyn’s comments about nightmares. She also looked older, which probably had a lot to do with being kidnapped by a maniac – although Jermyn’s condescension suggested she knew Liz’s true age. Freckles had come out along the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, and the sunburn had mostly died down into quite an impressive tan with equally impressive tan lines halfway down her upper arms and where her watch sat. She didn’t look much thinner, but then, it had only been about a week.

 

            Liz closed her eyes on the realisation that she already wasn’t sure how long she’d been away, and was almost grateful when stabbing pangs of hunger made themselves known, so she could push her homesickness away in favour of finding something to eat that wasn’t roasted meat with no seasoning at all.

 

***

           

            Their first day in the future was spent entirely resting and eating. When Liz got downstairs and found the kitchen, there was a cook in it, and Liz had to persuade him to show her how everything worked and then let her cook for herself. She managed a tolerable fried breakfast and a cup of coffee, although she thought that anything more complicated would be beyond her. The cupboards were all set back into the walls and slid open at a touch, and they lacked any labels to help Liz work out what they contained, so it was impossible to find anything. Worse, half the appliances were completely unfamiliar to Liz.

 

            Bacon and eggs tasted just the same, though. And the future didn’t appear to have altered the deliciousness of fried mushrooms.

 

            She ate her breakfast in the kitchen and washed up, feeling like she would be a bad guest if she didn’t, and then went to explore the rest of the house. It all looked very minimalistic and modern to her, but going by an off-hand comment of the cook’s and some of the knick-knacks on the walls and shelves – a framed iPod, a plain plastic biro on a stand – Liz gathered that Mr Eaglescroft was considered to have furnished his home in a deliberately old-fashioned style, and to be a great connoisseur of antiques.

 

            She was standing in something that appeared to be a library, although it contained very few books and those that were there were under glass, and squinting at what looked suspiciously like a piece of art by Banksy, when she heard footsteps outside in the corridor and turned her head.

 

            It was Jermyn, dressed and neat and clearly finding Liz’s discomfort funny. “Mr Eaglescroft asks if you’re well, and if you’re at leisure to attend him and Mrs Cutter in the study.”

 

            “Yes, thanks,” Liz said as neutrally as she could, and cast another puzzled glance at the putative Banksy before beginning to tear herself away.

 

            “That is a Banksy, in case you were wondering,” Jermyn said, with a nod towards the piece in question. “The Noughties Subversives aren’t very fashionable at the moment, but Mr Eaglescroft’s a huge fan.”

 

            “I can tell,” Liz said, thinking about the iPod, and the Converses, and wondering just how rich Simon Eaglescroft was that he could afford to buy all these things and (apparently) bankroll Helen Cutter.

 

            Jermyn led her to the study, and Liz knocked and let herself in.

 

            For a few moments, what with the way the window and the desk were placed, and the way Simon Eaglescroft was leaning over his desk with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his greying head bent, Liz could almost feel that she’d stepped into her father’s study at home. Then she registered Helen’s presence, and the fact that this room was much, much bigger, and the illusion was gone.

 

            Simon Eaglescroft handed Helen what looked surprisingly like an actual paper cheque, and Helen tucked it into her bra. Liz didn’t bother commenting.

 

            “Good morning, Liz,” Helen said with a smile. “Or afternoon. As the case may be.”

 

            “Morning,” Liz said, and nodded awkwardly at Mr Eaglescroft.

 

            “Sleep well?”

 

            Liz shrugged uneasily. “Okay.” She thought, but carefully did not say, _I woke up with a strange woman in my bed and we didn’t do anything but that totally freaks me out_. Helen probably knew all about it already. “Um, I like your library thing, Mr Eaglescroft. With the Banksy in.”

 

            “Thank you,” Eaglescroft smiled. “Most modern critics don’t think very much of Banksy’s work, but I maintain that Banksy was a counter-cultural subversive in a time when popular culture was increasingly homogenised, and that the high culture/low culture dichotomy they place Banksy on the so-called ‘wrong’ side of is a product of self-consciously elitist art forms of the early 1900s, and therefore not a valid yardstick to apply to Banksy himself.”

 

            “I don’t know very much about art,” Liz confessed uneasily.

 

            “Most people don’t,” Eaglescroft said generously. “Tell me, how did you find your room? I tried to make it twenty-first century appropriate, as Helen tells me that’s where you’re from, but the gulf between the two ends of the century technology-wise is massive and really very hard to judge. And then of course you don’t want to leave out the amenities in favour of authenticity.”

 

            “It’s nice, I like it,” Liz said inadequately, glancing uneasily at Helen. “I mean, some of the things in the bathroom were a bit unfamiliar, but I worked it out. Otherwise, it was very... authentic.” She indicated her toes. “I was surprised to see Converses. Do they still make them?”

 

            “Yes, but they’re quite hard to get hold of,” Eaglescroft answered, clearly getting into the swing of things. “They stopped manufacturing them for about a century, and then they came back into fashion, of course – people wearing lovingly or not-so-lovingly kept ones.”

 

            “I was thinking we could do a little sight-seeing today,” Helen interrupted. “I know it feels like it’s been ages since I’ve really _seen_ Cardiff.”

 

            Eaglescroft laughed. “For me, of course, it was a matter of weeks. But no, feel free. Liz, you will find a pad with maps of Cardiff and ads for some of our most popular tourist spots in the drawer of your bedside table.”

 

            He said the last two words with delight, and now that Liz thought about it, there had been a proper bedside table next to her bed, like something she might have bought from IKEA and promptly forgotten about, and a lamp which was actually pretty normal. Well, you touched it to turn it on, but she had one of those lamps at home. And it had no wires, but Liz hadn’t noticed that at first.

 

            “Cool,” she said, unable to keep uncertainty out of her voice, and glanced at Helen, who came to her rescue with a hand on her shoulder that – for once – Liz didn’t shrug off.

 

            “We’ll take ourselves off your hands, Simon. Thank you for the cheque; it’s appreciated. I’ll have my report typed in full for you in two days’ time, ready for the board meeting – I need to formally collate my notes.”

 

            “Of course,” Eaglescroft said, and smiled. “Have fun in the city.”

 

           

            Helen took her wandering around Cardiff. Liz had never actually been before, so there wasn’t too much difference between the city of the twenty-first century and the city of the twenty-third to confuse her, although Helen kept making throwaway comments about the amount of new building and remodelling in the last fifty years, and the increased wealth and influence of the university. She brought her to a place called Roald Dahl Plass, and seemed really surprised when Liz didn’t recognise it, then took her to supper at a café and paid for it with a plastic card like the one in Liz’s rucksack.

 

            “Cheques,” Liz said. “I’ve been meaning to ask.”

 

            Helen’s lips curled in a small, enigmatic smile. “Not quite cheques as you would know them. Those were rendered obsolete a long time ago. But with biometrics, personalised paper – there’s a place for cheques, in transactions that need to be quiet and secure.”

 

            “Because that’s not creepy at all,” Liz said. “What are we doing here, Kaye?”

 

            That was the other thing Helen had spent today doing: forcing her to use and remember the false names Helen had chosen.

 

            “Nothing very important, Melissa,” Helen said, with a faint stress on the name. “I want to introduce you to a few people. Make your face known. There are people you may need to deal with.”

 

            “Are you going to tell me what you have going on with Eaglescroft, then?” Liz said, picking at something which claimed to be authentic old-style English fish and chips. The stress on the authentic and real around this place freaked her out a bit, she decided. Particularly given how false she felt.

 

            “Soon,” Helen promised. “It’s not as complicated as you might think.”

 

            Liz scowled at her. “Don’t patronise me.”

 

            Helen leaned back in her chair. “Would I dare?”

 

            A seagull swooped in for the kill, or, more accurately, Liz’s supper, and the waitress swatted at it with something that buzzed faintly and sparked, like the godforsaken offspring of a taser and a fly swat. Attention caught, Liz stared momentarily.

 

            “Have fun with Jermyn last night?” Helen said, grinning evilly.

 

            Liz’s head snapped round. “What the fuck?”

 

            “She didn’t leave your room, did she?” Helen shook her head, smiling. “Poor Juliet.”

 

            “Nothing happened,” Liz said tightly. “Literally, nothing. I didn’t even know she’d climbed into bed with me.”

 

            “And will Juliet believe you when you say that?”

 

            “Yes,” Liz snapped. “Because I’ll tell her, and she knows I don’t lie to her. Jermyn said I had nightmares, Kaye, should I tell her who gave me them?”

 

            “No,” Helen said. “Because Jermyn wants to run Simon’s household, and if you told her anything, Melissa, then I would most regrettably have to get her fired. I wouldn’t want it to happen, but it would be a necessity.”

 

            They lapsed into a long, sullen silence.

 

            “I have to go to the bank,” Helen said, paying the bill with one swipe of that plastic card and getting up. “You can find your way back to the house from here?”

 

            Liz nodded crossly, and got up herself. “Kaye?”

 

            “Yes?”

 

            “If you ever say my girlfriend’s name again, I will drown you. Got it?”

 

            Helen’s face didn’t change, but she nodded slightly.

 

            Point made, Liz started to walk back to Simon Eaglescroft’s house. She took the longest route she could manage, full of detours and dawdling, and it still wasn’t long enough for all the thinking she had to do.

 

 

            That evening Helen and Simon Eaglescroft held some kind of supper; Liz, who wasn’t interested or invited, spent the time wrestling the TV and DVD player (apparently a great luxury, considering that DVDs had been obsolete for a hundred years) into working and playing the small collection of Noughties DVDs Eaglescroft had put together. She was allowed to get a takeaway for supper, so she did, and paid for it herself with the plastic card from her rucksack. She didn’t feel like admitting to the rush of independence that insignificant action gave her, but suspected that Helen would know anyway when she found out about the transaction. As it was, she looked fully occupied, Lara Croft twenty years on in a red dress and expensive jewellery, laughing and talking to the guests and behaving with a kind of casual possessiveness towards Eaglescroft.

 

            It occurred to Liz to wonder if Helen slept in her own room here. She asked the cook, who was currently between things to do – the main course being in the oven, and the first course just plated up and taken out – and so was at leisure to eye Liz’s supper disparagingly while she organised plates and cutlery and a glass of some kind of fizzy drink thing that tasted almost like Coke, if she closed her eyes and squinted.

           

            The cook actually laughed. “What do you think?”

 

            “I think I’m sorry I asked,” Liz grimaced. “But. No. _Seriously_?”

 

            The cook waggled his eyebrows. “Seriously. Mrs Cutter – or Kaye Cooke, as she’s calling herself now – very attractive older lady, wouldn’t you agree?”

 

            “God, no,” Liz said with instinctive revulsion.

 

            He laughed again. “The young have no taste these days. Out, _Melissa_ , you’re cluttering up my kitchen with that foul plastic stuff.”

 

            “I like the plastic stuff, and I fucking hate that name!”

 

            “Why do you think I call you by it? Go on, get lost.”

 

            Liz pulled a face at him and took her trayful of food away, stepping into the lift and punching in the number for her floor.

 

            To her surprise and consternation, it didn’t stop there; it stopped several floors earlier, and what Liz could only imagine were two of Eaglescroft’s guests stepped in.

 

            “... Going up?” Liz said rather faintly. She didn’t recognise either of them – a woman with a broad, friendly face and curly black hair, and a man with a round face, unkempt stubble, and black hair badly cut – but she really didn’t like the look in the man’s eyes, and she thought the way they were dressed was slightly suspect. She knew nothing about future fashions, but that definitely wasn’t black tie.

 

            “You a guest of Eaglescroft’s?” the man said abruptly.

 

            “Yes, sort of,” Liz said, and wondered how on earth to deal with a pair of gatecrashers when her arms were full of tray and food. “The dinner thing is downstairs.”

 

            The woman smiled. Her hand curled around the man’s, conciliatory, gentle. “Thank you. Simon’s house is so confusing. What’s your name, dear?”

 

            Liz wondered if there was something in the water that made twenty-third century people so patronising, or if it was just her face. “Melissa Cooke.”

 

            “I’m Lotta Fraser, and this is Ned. You’re not related to Kaye Cooke, by any chance? She’s an old colleague of ours.”

 

            “Ned Fraser?” Liz ventured, looking between the two of them. “And yes, I am. I’m her niece.”

 

            Lotta smiled, but shook her head.

 

“Ned Dobrowski,” Ned informed her, with a slight scowl Liz definitely hadn’t earned.

 

The lift’s doors pinged and slid open. Liz stepped out. “Well, um. Bye. Nice to meet you.”

 

The lift doors slid closed again; Lotta waved slightly, but Ned only glowered.

 

Liz stood very still for a moment, then took her takeaway in to her room and set it down on the floor, in front of  the video menu for the box set of _Firefly_ (now a cult classic of art cinema, which had confused Liz, who expected to find it filed under ‘sci-fi’), which was revolving gently on the screen. There was a screen on the wall; she closed her eyes and tried to remember how Jermyn had explained it to her, and when that failed, just poked the touchscreen until she got through to the colleague of Jermyn’s who was meant to be opening the door to guests and serving the meals.

 

“Yes, Miss Cooke, what is it? I’m busy, if you don’t mind!”  


She did look rather frazzled, Liz noted. “I came across some people in the lift who I’m almost sure aren’t meant to be here. A man and a woman, both relatively short, both dark-haired. The man looks like a total bastard, but the woman’s quite nice.”

 

“Names?”

 

“Lotta Fraser and Ned Dobrowski.”

 

“I’ll look into it. Thanks. Bye.” 

 

Liz didn’t think she would do anything of the kind, but she also didn’t think investigating the mysterious Ms Fraser and Mr Dobrowski was her problem. So she went back to her takeaway and her episodes of _Firefly_ , and when she heard shouting from downstairs, she didn’t go to investigate.


	10. Chapter 10

 

Helen and Eaglescroft were out all the next day, although Liz did receive a personal message from Mr Eaglescroft thanking her for alerting them to the gatecrashers. Liz spent the entire day exploring the city and visiting all the tourist attractions – she thought the Senedd rather dull and ugly, despite the virtue it made of its ‘Millenial architecture!’, but liked the Spine, a very wobbly skyscraper with a glass balcony that was probably meant to be the Welsh Empire State Building. She had a picture taken of herself looking out over the city towards the Bristol Channel, and bought the resulting photo from the reception desk inside, a hologram in a cheap plastic frame which she tried not to goggle at too much and resolved to take home to show her parents.  

 

Helen didn’t appear that evening. Liz got more takeaway, although the cook complained bitterly and said his professional pride was affronted, and watched all the series of the 2010s BBC Sherlock Holmes adaptation she could find. It was good, although she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to deal with having seen it all when – at the time that she’d left – not even the first episode had been shown.

 

            The best thing, though, was probably the sleeping. Even knowing that nightmares would probably wake her in the night – and they did, several times – the bed was really comfortable, no-one was going to make her get up in the morning, and there was nothing quite like waking up, panicking for a moment, and then realising she was safe, if not free. The only thing that would have made it better was Juliet curled up beside her, or being able to go down the corridor and bother her dad, or going to the kitchen for a cup of chamomile tea and finding Jon sitting at the breakfast bar with a glass of whisky, because then she’d have known that she wasn’t actually alone.

 

            Still, when she went a whole two days without seeing hide nor hair of Helen or Simon Eaglescroft, Liz was ever so slightly concerned. Enough that, when Helen found her on the roof garden eating lunch and reading the news on the pad Eaglescroft just casually left on her bedside table, her first words were “Where the fuck did you go? Didn’t you think I might run away?”

 

            “Business,” Helen said. The suit she was wearing made that look like it might be at least halfway true, too. “And no, I didn’t. After all, where would you go?”

 

            “Try _when_ would I go,” Liz said.

 

            Helen smiled, and it looked strangely sad and strangely sincere. “You’ve spent less than a month behind the anomalies, Liz Lester, you couldn’t find an anomaly home on your own if you tried. You’d get lost. And some of the people who might find you are not as nice as me.”  


            Liz got up. “You mean like Ned Dobrowski and Lotta Fraser?”

 

            Helen’s eyes sharpened. “Oh, Lotta’s all right. But Ned – Ned’s a nasty piece of work. And those aren’t their real names; Lotta’s Charlotte, Charlotte Cameron, and he’s Ethan Dobrowski, not Ned. Be careful of him, if you see him again.”

 

            Liz shrugged.

 

            “We’re going out, tonight.”

 

            Liz looked up sharply. “Where?”

 

            “You’ll see when we get there. There’s make-up in the drawer under your sink and clothes on your bed. You’ve got an hour to get ready.”

 

 

“This is a piece of shit,” Liz told Helen, half an hour later. She tugged irritably at the hem of a black tunic, which draped expensively from unusually broad, strong shoulders for a teenaged girl to end at mid-thigh over heavily patterned black leggings and knee-high black boots. It was not Liz’s style, and although she’d done her best to offset it with a blue glass bracelet she’d bought for herself that read CARDIFF 2260 and a violent slash of bright blue eyeliner found in the drawer Helen had told her about, she still felt uncomfortably as though she was in mourning.

 

            She’d really had enough of mourning, Liz thought, and suppressed a snarl.

 

            Helen, whose violet dress followed impressive curves and had an equally impressive slit up to one side, merely smiled. “Language, Melissa.”

 

            _Melissa_ , Liz’s lips shaped scornfully. She couldn’t get used to that name; it fit awkwardly on her skin. “Where are we going, _Kaye_?”

 

            Helen led her down a side-street. “Some people call it the bar at the end of the universe.”

 

            Liz, who knew her Douglas Adams, sniggered.

 

            “Other people,” Helen said, fingers tightening on Liz’s wrist and exquisitely painted nails digging in, “call it Biers. But I never trust a Pratchett fan, and neither should you.”

 

            She took a sharp right into a doorway covered by a beaded curtain, and dragged Liz with her, then immediately dropped her wrist. Liz cursed under her breath, rubbing her bruised skin and shifting imperceptibly backwards. “Seriously. What the fuck is this?”

 

            “It’s a bar,” Helen said matter-of-factly. “The food is passable, the drinks are better.” She grinned. “The gossip is best of all. There are a few tourists here, but not many. Mostly, this place is full of genuine travellers. Don’t be surprised if a few of them know my real name, and don’t even think about telling them yours.”

 

            “Why?” Liz demanded, mind already running ahead with plans. Other travellers would know other anomalies. Some of them might even know their way back to the twenty-first century. She could pay her way home somehow; she doubted that anyone here knew more about Helen Cutter than she did.

 

            “Because no-one here will dare take you away from me,” Helen said sweetly, divesting herself of a slinky gold jacket. “Just because I’m only one of several travellers, Melissa, doesn’t mean I’m not the _best_.”

 

            “No,” Liz lied impatiently, handing her coat to the girl in charge of the cloakroom, “I meant – why _Cardiff_?”

 

            “Typical Londoner,” Helen said, and opened a heavy door, letting noise and chatter and dim light out. “Your city isn’t the centre of the universe, you know. Hasn’t been for a long time. And anyway, Cardiff has a sort of tradition behind it. Order what you like at the bar, I have an open tab under the name of Kaye Cooke, but don’t get drunk. Nice girls don’t, you know.”

 

            “Do I look nice to you?” Liz said crossly, and followed her in.

 

 

            Helen let her loose almost the moment they entered the bar; she’d been drawn away into a corner, laughing and teasing as she greeted what looked like old friends. Liz seized the opportunity to spend time without her and half-lower her guard, and headed directly for the bar. The barman wasn’t over-occupied, and it was the work of a minute to bad-temperedly order a rum and coke and a selection of tapas.

           

            “On Kaye Cooke’s tab,” she added, when she’d finished.

 

            The barman nodded. “Name?”

 

            “Melissa Cooke,” Liz said, and hated how easily the lie came from her lips.

 

            The barman’s eyebrows shot up. “Daughter?”

 

            “Niece,” Liz said, and that didn’t come nearly so easily, now that she wasn’t worrying about the person she was talking to - mentally, she apologised to Aunt Alison, Uncle Theo and Uncle Ralph. She hadn’t felt the need to before. Lying to Ned Dobrowski had practically been a public service.

 

            The barman poured her a rum and coke and then went away to order the tapas. Liz sipped at it, and stared absently at the wall of bottles and mirror across the counter from her. Her boots, with their wedge heel, kicked absently at the barstool’s supports, and she looked absorbed if not content.

 

            A man with short brown hair, what looked like a receding hairline to Liz, and indeterminate greenish eyes, moved down the bar to sit next to her. Liz’s head whipped round, and she wished that instead of seeing the sights of the twenty-third century she’d gone out and bought a proper knife. She was weaponless apart from her drink, and she didn’t think she could glass someone in the face. Not properly, anyway. Jon had once told her how, when he wasn’t quite as drunk as he looked, but he hadn’t exactly given her a practical demonstration.

 

            “Easy,” the man said. His bland face had little expression to it, but he looked faintly amused. “I don’t mean a follower of the Jezebel’s any harm. It’s more than my life’s worth. I just wanted to shake hands with such a good liar.”

 

            Liz eyed him warily. “I don’t shake hands with people who insult me.”

 

            The man held out a hand.

 

            Liz’s eyes narrowed. “I also don’t shake hands with strange men who turn up from nowhere and give no names. Who’s the Jezebel?”

 

            “Helen Cutter,” the man said casually. “Kaye Cooke, if you like. But she’s never brought you here before. What’s your name?”

 

            Liz’s plate of tapas arrived. Liz picked at it, and kept it carefully away from the man and his half-empty glass of beer. “Melissa. What’s yours?”

 

            “John. There, now we’re both lying through our teeth.” The man – for whom Liz had no better name than John – bought a packet of pretzels from the barman, and popped it open. “When are you from?”

 

            “The twenty-first century. You?”

 

            “Twenty-fifth. And that’s a truth.”

 

            “So was mine.”

 

            “Helen Cutter’s from the twentieth,” John said. “Where did she pick you up, _Melissa_?”

 

            Liz could get to hate that name. Even more than she already did, that is. “Why do you want to know?”

 

            “I’m always interested in the Jezebel’s movements.” John finished his beer, but not his pretzels. “And I’m also interested in how a kid who can’t be more than seventeen comes to be trailing in her wake. What’s your job?”

 

            “I haven’t got one,” Liz said, and indicated to the barman that the next round was on her.

 

            “You’re buying me drinks on the Jezebel’s tab?” John’s eyes glittered. “I could get to like you, Melissa.”

 

            “Colour me thrilled,” Liz muttered.

 

            “But there must be something you do for the Jezebel,” John mused. “She doesn’t go in for extras. There’s no sentimental attachment, is there, or she’d have taken you over to say hello to her friends and enemies.”

 

            “Which are you?” Liz asked, as sweetly as she knew how, which wasn’t very.

 

            “The latter, probably,” John said cheerfully. “I can think of several things you might do for the Jezebel. But you’re a little young for her, aren’t you?”

 

            Juliet’s face and Jermyn’s flashed into Liz’s mind, with attendant grief and guilt, and her hand snapped out. John shifted, but was too slow; she caught him by the throat and dragged him closer to her, thumb resting over the big artery. “I’m her _niece_ , dipshit,” she snarled. “That’s _sick_.”  


            “If you’re her niece, I’m a canary.”

 

            Liz pressed her thumb against the artery, just long enough to remind John who was in charge. In truth, he could have fought her – he was bigger than she was, and she wasn’t armed – but he didn’t even try. Liz didn’t spare the time or energy to be unnerved. “ _So tweet_.”

 

            “Tweet,” John said, and Helen’s hands fell onto Liz’s shoulders.

 

            “Melissa, Melissa, Melissa,” she said. “What have I told you about playing with your food before you eat it?”

 

            “He’s talking shit, Aunt Kaye,” Liz said, and the words burnt her throat like acid.

 

            Helen’s fingers tightened on Liz’s shoulders. “Put him down anyway, Melissa. You don’t know where he’s been.”

 

            Reluctantly, Liz let go of John.

 

            “Where did you get your toy soldier, Jezebel?” John enquired, rubbing his throat. “Teach her some manners while she’s still your conscript, why don’t you?”

 

            “Melissa will do,” Helen smiled. “She may be rough around the edges, but she’s useful. The same can’t be said for you.”

 

            “You wound me.” John straightened his jacket.

 

            “Come along, Melissa,” Helen said, releasing Liz. “I have some friends who would like to meet you.”

 

            Liz gave John one last warning look, promising fire and destruction if he ever came near her again, and followed Helen into her quieter, darker corner, where heavily made-up faces and sharp suits laughed at her and called her a little spitfire, a scrapper, a fighter in the making. Liz let fury coil rich and hot under her skin, and kept her own counsel. She had the unsettling feeling that she’d already said too much.

 

 

            When she went to the cloakroom to get her coat and Helen’s jacket, her coat rustled suspiciously as she took it. Too angry to be careful, she dug her hands into the pockets and drew out a slip of paper – a bill for a coffee and a cheap fried breakfast from a greasy spoon in London, dated the fifth of November 1988. _My real name is Matt Anderson_ , said the message, scribbled in obsolete biro. _Come back here when you’re sick of the Jezebel, Toy Soldier, and I’ll see what I can do by way of answers._

 

            Liz looked up at the cloakroom girl, who had gone white when she pulled out the piece of paper. “You were paid to plant this in my coat, weren’t you?”

 

            Quiet and gentle. Easy does it. Liz tilted her head to one side, consciously made her body language less aggressive, and tried for the slow smile Juliet liked so much, her most conciliatory manners.

 

            The cloakroom girl nodded.

 

            “By a man with an Irish accent, a bland face and no expressions,” Liz prompted. “Possibly calling himself John.”

 

            She nodded again.

 

            “Right,” Liz murmured, more to herself than anyone else, “well...” She flashed the girl another, brighter smile. “Got a pen?”

 

            “John left one,” the cloakroom girl said, increasingly confident, and took the biro from her pocket. “He said if there was no return message I could sell it.”

 

            Liz took the pen from her, and tapped it against her closed lips. Then she scribbled a few words on the other side of the bill, folded it, and handed both back to the cloakroom girl. “Here’s a return message, and here’s the pen. I’d sell it anyway if I were you.”

 

            The cloakroom girl smiled, though it was rather wobbly, and Liz took the coats and went back to Helen.

 

            _Mine is Liz Lester_ , her return message had read. _Never call me a toy soldier again._

 

            Before she entered the bar at the end of the universe, she paused and consciously wiped the small, smug smile from her face. What Helen didn’t know wouldn’t kill her.

 

 

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Simon Eaglescroft said when they got home.

 

“Oh yes,” Helen said, smiling like a predator and trailing her fingers lightly down the lapel of his suit in a way that suggested she wouldn’t mind enjoying herself some more.  Eaglescroft looked kind of besotted, or at least enthralled, which was just – well, it was his business, his problem, but Liz didn’t think much of his taste in women.

 

“Just fine,” Liz said, standing on one leg to take off her heeled boots. “No-one got _too_ hammered and I didn’t see anyone throw up, but I had to try and choke someone and there were _definitely_ a couple of people getting off in the corners. Pretty average night, if you ask me.”

 

Eaglescroft and Helen stared at each other, and then Liz.

 

“Teenagers,” Helen said with eloquent disgust.

 

Liz grinned.


	11. Chapter 11

            Liz returned to the bar at the end of the universe two nights later, seeing it as a blessed relief from the previous night’s entertainment – a dinner hosted by Helen and Eaglescroft, at which Liz was not required to do anything other than wear a suit and occasionally join in the conversation. She lost her temper a little once or twice, and (she was fairly confident) broke someone’s toe by stamping on it when he very unsubtly tried to catch hold of her backside, but Helen didn’t seem to mind; her reproofs to ‘Melissa’ were full of smiles. Liz wondered, as she walked briskly along Cardiff’s busy evening streets, if that had been Helen’s whole idea in introducing her. If, as Helen’s right-hand woman, she was supposed to inspire fear in the people Helen inspired lust in.

 

            Liz hated to be manipulated. She scowled and kicked non-existent stones all the way to the bar at the end of the universe and her appointment with Matt Anderson.

 

            The bar was quiet when she went in and the bored bartender was wiping down the counter. He looked up, and eyed her with interest. “Left the Jezebel behind, Toy Soldier?”

 

            Liz winced. “That nickname’s shit. And yes, I have – just for this evening. Wouldn’t you, if you were stuck with her for weeks on end?”

 

            He grinned. “Depends how those weeks were spent.”

 

            “She’s a praying mantis. Eats her mates for dinner. Can I have some tapas and a pint of beer, please, on Kaye Cooke’s tab.”

 

            “Yours in just a minute, Toy Soldier.”

 

            Liz rolled her eyes. “Piss off.”

 

            “Yes’m.” He saluted.

 

            “And that was a piece of shit salute, I hope you know.”

 

            The bartender slid the beer she’d asked for over to her. “I’ll have you know I did my two years’ National Service, same as everyone else.”

 

            “I bet you made your drill sergeant cry,” Liz said with asperity. “Seen Matt Anderson this evening?”

 

            He shook his head. “In about half an hour he’ll be in, I should think – ’s his usual time. He was in yesterday. Asked after you.”

 

            Liz shrugged. “We have an appointment.” She fielded a salacious grin, and glowered. “For fuck’s sake. He’s not female enough for me. It’s a business appointment.”

 

            That got her a raised eyebrow. “Does the Jezebel know you’re doing business on your own time?”

 

            “My time isn’t my own any more,” Liz said truthfully, and then piled lie after lie on unblushingly. “She knows, but unofficially. I’m here to be deniable, and if I find that information’s been sold on, Zander Griffith, then I’ll know who sold it, won’t I?”

 

            The barman went white: most of the patrons called him Igor, after the bartender at the undead bar in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books – classic literature these days, Liz had discovered, and almost as much of a common point of reference for the travellers who frequented the bar at the end of the universe as the Harry Potter books. But Tom wasn’t distinguished enough for Griffith, and Madam Rosmerta not really his style, so Igor it was – and Liz knew, because she’d overheard it at that foul dinner party, that Griffith thought none of the travellers knew his true name. He underestimated their resources.

 

            Liz smiled. It was not a friendly smile. “Didn’t I order some tapas, Igor? And I can see what you’re thinking, and I’ll have them without the side order of poison, thanks.”

 

            “I wouldn’t,” the bartender began, still deathly white.

 

            Liz channelled her father’s PA, who could, when she chose, make a bland and reassuring voice and words sound like landmines with radiation poisoning to go. “I know you wouldn’t, don’t worry. Tapas, please.”

 

            Griffith went away to get her tapas, and Liz settled in to wait.

 

 

            She had chosen a spot where the mirrored glass behind the bar counter would let her see the door and anyone coming through it quite clearly. She had a proper knife, the product of a small shopping spree yesterday, tucked into the top of her boot. She had a basic knowledge of the surrounding area – not much, but more than she’d had in her first encounter with Matt Anderson. All in all, she felt comparatively well prepared. All she needed was for him to turn up.

 

            Some twenty minutes into her wait, a pair of familiar figures strolled into her sights – but they were not Matt Anderson. Liz forced herself to be still, not to straighten or stiffen obviously, and kept a careful eye on Lotta Fraser and Ned Dobrowski, or rather Charlotte Cameron and Ethan Dobrowski. Charlotte moved off towards a group of friends in the corner, but Ethan made a beeline for her. Liz felt a spike of alarm, and remembered Helen’s words – a nasty piece of work, she’d called him. Obeying instinct, she slipped off her stool and snapped round to face him before he could grab her.

 

            “ _You_ ,” he snarled. Christ, he made Finn look subtle.

 

            “Ned Dobrowski, I presume,” Liz said crossly, shifting her leg slightly so she could feel the knife’s comforting pressure. “Or Ethan, you know, what’s a stray first name between acquaintances? Is there a problem, because I have an appointment, and it’s not with you.”

 

            “You got us thrown out of Eaglescroft’s!”

 

            Liz noted, with some relief, that Charlotte Cameron was headed towards them. “You gatecrashed. And because I didn’t know who you were, I didn’t know if you were meant to be there or not – for all I knew I was redirecting lost guests. Is it my fault I was in the lift at the same time as you?”

 

            “Of course not,” Charlotte said, grabbing Ethan’s arm. “Ethan, leave her alone. Can’t you see she’s only a kid?”

 

            Liz watched Ethan carefully. She was no expert, but she knew when someone was walking around armed, and every instinct was screaming at her that Ethan had a knife and was prepared to use it on her, whatever Charlotte had said.

 

            “She’s older than I was when I started travelling,” Ethan snarled, but Liz could hear him calming down.

 

            “Not much,” Charlotte said gently, her hands light on his arm and shoulder. “How old are you, Melissa? Seventeen?”

 

            “Sixteen,” Liz corrected, and heard a sudden flat silence which made her think _oh shit, I’m not in control any more_. She saw surprise and maybe even shock in Charlotte’s eyes, and asked herself what kind of a difference a year was supposed to make, that being sixteen was so much more of a scandal.

 

            Ethan laughed harshly. “Did you think you were running away to the circus?”

 

            “I think I received an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Liz snapped, embarrassed. She glanced around and knew she wouldn’t be able to talk quietly and privately with Matt here, not today; she had to cut her losses. “Are we done here?”

 

            “We’re done,” Ethan confirmed, still looking slightly contemptuous; Liz itched to slap the expression off his face.

 

            “Good,” Liz said, finished her drink – Griffith looked as if he had half a mind to take it off her, but she stopped him with a poisonous glare – and marched out.

 

            She was so annoyed she stamped all the way back to Simon Eaglescroft’s house, and – nothing on her mind but the humiliation of being pitied by thirty-something complete strangers – she totally missed the sight of Matt Anderson on the other side of the street, in company with another, thinner and older man dressed like a distinguished professor with straggly, mostly grey hair, making his way to the bar at the end of the universe.

 

           

            The next morning, Liz woke to the sound of someone walking quietly up to her room. She lay still, listening, for a minute, and then recognised the tread. She rolled her eyes.

 

            “Helen.”

 

            “Ah. You’re awake.”

 

            Liz got out of bed and opened her door, the better to confront Helen. “Yeah. I am. Any reason for the wake-up call?”

 

            Helen nodded. “We’re leaving this afternoon. I thought you might appreciate the notice. Is there anything you need?”

 

            “Think I’m all right,” Liz said with a shrug, mind racing to think of ways Helen might have learnt of her trip to the bar at the end of the universe and finding far too many.

 

            “Good.” Helen paused. “This time we’re not taking the clones.”

 

            Liz stared. “Any reason why?”  


            “You need to learn not to rely on them. They’re too much of a crutch, them and modern weapons.”

 

            Liz stared some more. “At least tell me we’re going somewhere without vast numbers of bitey things. I need easing into this no modern weapons stuff. I mean, seriously, Helen, what’s wrong with evening the odds?”

 

            Helen just smiled and ignored the latter half of her point. “Pleistocene. Practically modern. You should feel right at home.”

 

            “But wouldn’t that mean humans?” Liz said uncertainly. Neither Lester nor Lyle talked about the anomaly project in any great detail, not around her, but she knew that the ARC’s scientists and soldiers were not allowed to go anywhere near any time period where there might be humans, in case they changed history. At the time, hearing that had just made her want to quote _Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure_ , but now it made her nervous.

 

            Helen raised an eyebrow. “Ancient human populations were miniscule. Chances of actual contact are very low. Are you concerned?”

 

            “I’m always concerned,” Liz said, and Helen laughed.

 

 

            When she’d gone away, Liz flopped back onto her bed and thought furiously. There was now no chance of meeting up with Matt Anderson; she had no idea where to find him. It had only ever been a possibility, and quite a distant one at that, that Anderson would have known about the anomalies and been willing to take her back to her own time – and she wasn’t even sure if he was trustworthy. Of course, she wasn’t sure of that when it came to Helen, either – but Helen’s untrustworthiness was a known quality, and unless Liz pushed her really hard it wouldn’t lead her to destroying Liz. Liz growled and flipped onto her front. Helen was still her best option, and that rankled.

 

            “I was sent to help you pack,” said Jermyn from the doorway, sounding entirely too amused as usual. Liz was surrounded by people determined to have a laugh at her expense.

 

            “Seriously?” Liz grumbled, without moving her face from the pillow it had landed in. “Piss off.”

 

           

            Reaching the anomaly into the Pleistocene entailed a three-hour journey in one of those cars that hovered inches above the ground, a sleek navy blue beast that would have fascinated Liz’s father. The journey was tedious, and Liz wished for her iPod, left where it had fallen in Battersea Park and now presumably the property of whichever enterprising citizen had found it first. She stared out of the window for signs of the two centuries that had gone by since she’d last set foot in modern England, and found nothing very striking except more industrial parks, less greenery, and motorway signs that shimmered and altered to reflect the current state of the road without being pixelated, broken, or plastered with cheesy countdowns to the Olympics. There were also a few of the driverless cars she’d noticed in Cardiff, but she and Helen had an actual chauffeur.

 

            Helen didn’t speak during the drive. Her farewell with Simon Eaglescroft had been effusive, and Liz had spent all of it determinedly gazing out of the window, on the grounds that it was bad enough living with Dad and Jon’s public displays of affection at home. She did wonder for a while if Helen was actually upset at leaving Eaglescroft behind, but then abandoned the question as unsolvable.

 

            Finally, the car drew up in a private estate, and Liz and Helen climbed out of the car and shouldered their rucksacks.

 

            “Bloody hell,” Liz said, staring at the medium-sized mansion before them. “Eaglescroft must be _loaded_.”

 

            “A heady combination of old and new money,” Helen agreed, and led the way round the side of the house to a small and suspiciously sturdy-looking garden shed, which she unlocked with a touch of her index finger to the rusty padlock. The apparently flimsy wooden door swung open, and turned out to be backed with a sheet of steel and something much, much heavier.

 

            “Huh,” Liz said, impressed despite herself, and tapped it with her knuckles. It rang satisfyingly.

 

            Helen just waited silently. Liz was so busy banging the door, swinging it back and forth on its hinges, and wondering what the heavy backing was that she was quite surprised when Helen yanked the door out of her hands and jammed it open, and then an anomaly flowered into life, bright and startling.

 

            Liz gaped.

 

            “Say goodbye to the twenty-third century, Liz,” Helen said. “We won’t be coming back for a while.”

 

            When Liz walked through the anomaly, she did so without looking back.

 

***

 

            Liz emerged blinking into the weak Pleistocene sunlight, and shivered. “It’s cold!”

 

            Helen cast a cursory glance round, and fished her jacket out of her rucksack. “This? Hardly. This is a British Pleistocene summer, Liz. You ought to see it in the winter.”

 

            “I really, really don’t want to,” Liz muttered, riffling through her rucksack and looking round her. The Pleistocene looked moderately familiar, but not in the sense of a UK landscape she recognised; it looked more like some kind of tundra on a BBC nature programme, with high blue hills in the distance, low, flat, undulated grassland with low shrubs, small flowers, and a stiff breeze. But the sky was a soft, washed-out blue, with little clouds scudding across it, and that looked like every clear English autumn day Liz had ever seen.

 

            “Very pretty,” Liz said at last, dragging the offending jacket out from its place and pulling it on.

 

            Helen nodded absently. “And not too many predators to worry about.”

 

            “That makes me feel better,” Liz said.

 

            “Just humans and wolves and sabre-tooths, really.”

 

            “That doesn’t.”

 

            “I’ll take care of you,” Helen assured her, and it might just have been Liz’s imagination but it sounded an order of magnitude less creepy than it had only a few weeks ago. Helen nudged her with the toe of her boot. “Come on. Get moving.”

 

           

            As they walked, heading directly for the blue hills, Helen filled Liz in on her plans: three days’ walking in the Pleistocene to bring them to what Helen called a Choose Your Own Adventure place (“Grassland, just grassland, as far as the eye can see. Except for all the anomalies,”) and then into an anomaly which would take them to a period much closer to the present day.

 

            Liz’s head snapped round. “What?”

 

            “Oh, well,” Helen said with flippant unconcern. “2036.”

 

            Liz choked on a deep, steady, calming breath. “I’d be in my forties!”

 

            “Would you?” Helen said with interest, and appeared to think. “So you would.”

 

            “I’d be old!”

 

            “I beg your pardon,” Helen said, and Liz remembered that Helen herself was forty-something. “In any case, you won’t age the second you step through the anomaly, so I wouldn’t worry if I were you.”  


            Liz went back to simmering and walking. 2036! So close to home, and yet way too far off... but maybe she could get away from Helen, Liz thought with rising excitement, find the ARC, and they could send her back. Nearly twenty years of research – they must have learnt to control the anomalies by now, right?

 

            Or not. The bubble of optimism burst as abruptly as it had risen. What if the ARC didn’t exist any more? What if they didn’t believe her when she told them who she was, and what had happened to her? What if she couldn’t get free of Helen?

 

            Liz shook her head and stared at her feet and breathed carefully, so as not to scream, or turn on Helen when it would do her no good. How many missed chances would there be before she made it home?

 

            Sensibly, Helen said nothing to her. But when they finally stopped and made camp in the open, dusk falling slowly around them and nothing more threatening than a herd of dark, woolly-humped aurochs spotted in the distance all day, Liz was astonished to find how easy it was after a week of luxury to go back to building the fire and boiling unidentified greens in not very much water while Helen roasted ptarmigan she’d taken down with stones and set snares for the morning, how simple it was to fall back into the routine of setting watches.

 

            And as the fire flickered gaudy copper before her, and the night glowed black above her, Liz Lester sat up to watch for danger and cried because it all felt so normal.

 

            She wasn’t much for crying, and seldom expressed emotion that way. She’d rant and scream and go to the gym to beat the shit out of a punching bag, but not cry: crying was the final admission that she was helpless, that there was nothing left she could do and that she was at the mercy of her circumstances. She had last wept for her brother Jamie’s death, over a year ago, although the memory of it had brought tears back since then. She never thought that made her tough, only that it made her weird, and that tears were one less inconvenience to contend with.

 

            But she was helpless now, every potential escape route closing before her, scared and isolated without family or friends to bolster her – and Liz was no natural loner; sooner or later she needed people, to protect, to care for, to be protected by and cared for in her turn. And Helen bloody Cutter, Liz thought venomously, didn’t fucking count – so she kept her stinging eyes open and cried away her watch.

 

            If she saw the faint glitter of Helen’s stealthily opened eyes, she didn’t react, and Helen was wise enough not to speak and try to comfort her.


	12. Chapter 12

The next day, they hit trouble.

It was about midday; they had been walking almost since dawn, Helen inclining to a slightly slower pace for once. Perhaps there was less of a deadline on this anomaly, or whatever. Liz really didn’t care.

It had clouded over since the previous day, although Helen didn’t seem to think they were due rain. The weather, Liz realised, was ideal for walking long distances; a little cool but dry underfoot, and no rain or dangerous predators. Well, none that were visible and taking an interest in them.

Liz had quickly warmed up as she walked, to the point where she’d taken her jacket off. She still felt rather melancholy, but a few hours’ sleep and the odd plant tea Helen had produced, along with squares of Kendal Mint Cake (‘Still Made To The Original 400-Year-Old Recipe!’) for breakfast had made her feel a bit less hopeless. It didn’t matter how many chances she missed, so long as she took one, and there would be another one. They even had supper in the bag, although Liz had politely declined to carry the two ptarmigan Helen’s snares had picked up. As days in the past went, this one was positively pleasant.

It was just as Liz was entertaining this rather sardonic reflection that she felt something score along her side, and let out a yelp. Helen spun round, and her eyes widened as she saw Liz. Liz herself was somewhat confused, but her side stung, sharp and painful, and as her disbelieving fingers met something hot and wet where dirty black cotton should be, her eyes fell on a thin shaft of wood with a bloodied flint head, lying on the ground before her.

“Fuck,” Liz said faintly, and added indignantly: “I’ve been shot by a caveman!” Her voice was rather louder than she had meant it to be, and her head whipped round at an answering yell of astonishment.

“We need to go,” Helen said urgently, halfway up the slope ahead of her. “Come on, Liz, come on –”

“But,” Liz said, looking blankly up at her, meaning but, what if they want to help? but, my side? but, I’m bleeding? and a hundred other things Helen didn’t seem to think were very important.

Helen grabbed her arm and tugged, and Liz found herself moving at a stumbling, crashing run, dizzy and dripping blood. That’s bad, she thought, as the world moved around her seemingly without her involvement, and put a hand to her waist and tried to stem the bleeding. It hurt, and she sobbed with pain, Helen almost dragging her arm out of its socket as she pulled her on. 

The sounds of pursuit had long died away when they stopped, but Liz had no idea how far they had gone. Helen pulled a shirt out of her bag and helped Liz push it against the wound, then slipped an arm under her shoulders and helped her limp on until they reached a small cave, where Helen sat Liz down so she could poke around inside and check whether it had been previously inhabited. Apparently satisfied, she half-carried Liz into the cave, and started to set up a fire. Liz pulled out of her rucksack’s straps and sat back against it, pushing the now half-soaked t-shirt up against the slice that had been taken out of her waist. She stared down at it, almost unable to believe this was happening.

Helen was heating water over the new, feeble little fire, and now she pulled her first-aid kit out of her rucksack and carried it over to Liz. “Take these,” she said without preamble, popping two small white tablets out of a blister pack and offering them to Liz, who squinted suspiciously at them.

“What?...”

“Painkillers.”

Liz took them from her and dry-swallowed them. She had never had trouble taking pills, but she had to fight to swallow these, nearly retching them up several times before she finally managed to get them down.

“All right?” Helen said briskly, and Liz nodded, unable to trust herself to move. Even that made her feel dizzy and sick.

“Get your shirt off. I need to see.”

Liz hesitated, driven by obscure, half-remembered concern, and then slowly and painfully tugged her shirt off. There was a wide tear in it where her flesh and the shirt’s cotton had been torn by the arrow, drenched darker than dusty black with her blood. Helen put it aside and examined the wound itself, mopping at it carefully with a wetted corner of the t-shirt she’d given Liz to staunch the blood with. It was bleeding only slowly now, and Helen gave a sigh of relief as she finished examining it.

“Surface only. Won’t need stitches.”

“Well thank fuck,” Liz said, fixing on these statements as things that made sense, even if it did feel like a very abstract sort of sense. Whatever Helen had given her was strong and fast-acting; she now felt disassociated rather than woozy. “Because we’re still a day and a half away from civilisation and the nearest Minor Injuries Unit and there’s no fucking way you’re coming near me with a needle, just no, not happening, nuh-uh.”

Helen chuckled dryly, and Liz vaguely realised she was babbling at the older woman. “I need to clean and dress this. Lie on your side.”

Even through the rosy fog the little tablets had brought on, that hurt. Liz gritted her teeth and tried not to tense too much, her hands curling into tight white-knuckled fists of their own accord, and was very glad indeed when it was over. 

“Hold there and try not to faint,” Helen said softly, patting her back almost affectionately, and then stepped away. Liz was concentrating on breathing and following Helen’s instructions; she didn’t register anything until Helen unlaced her boots, pulled them off, and helped her to slide into her sleeping bag. Helen held water to her lips and made her drink, then drew the bag’s top lip up over her as she subsided down onto the bag, blinking with exhaustion – and also, probably, the tablets.

“Go to sleep,” Helen said softly. “I’ll take care of this.”

Liz nodded, yawned, and fell backwards into blissful, numbing sleep.

 

The next time she was awake and aware, Liz was dimly astonished to find that it was broad daylight, when it had still been light when she fell asleep. She stirred, and found words to mutter something – even she had no idea what – aloud.

Helen, who had been transferring boiled water into a water bottle, turned swiftly. “Ah,” she said, with a quick smile Liz just about recognised as one she put on when preoccupied – when anxious, thinking of something else, or only half sincere. “You’re awake.”

“How long have I been asleep?” Liz demanded, trying to sit up and cursing and falling back onto an elbow, defeated by the flaring of an ache in her side which reminded her where she was and what had happened to her.

Helen helped her up, although Liz swore and hissed between her teeth at the resulting discomfort. “Depends on your measure. You woke in the middle of the night, but you were feverish. I’m not sure you knew me.”

Liz’s stomach rumbled. 

“Plus, you wouldn’t eat.” Helen put a bowl of something into Liz’s hands, which Liz now found to be unaccountably feeble.

Liz peered at the bowl, and then let out a startled laugh. “What is this, Pleistocene chicken soup for the soul?”

“As close as I could manage,” Helen grinned. “It even tastes quite respectable – I found some herbs I know down at the other end of the gully, by the spring.”

Liz vaguely remembered stumbling through a small, shallow stream with a stony bottom, and saw that her socks and boots were drying by the fire. She sipped at the soup, which was as anomaly meals went very decent – although ptarmigan was not an adequate substitute for chicken, and Liz really had no idea what the herbs Helen had used to flavour it were. “The hunters didn’t come after us?”

Helen shook her head. “I think we managed to lose them.” She ran a hand through her rather greasy hair, making it stick up, and making Liz remember how long it had been since she’d washed her hair. “It was probably an accident. We were hidden by the bushes, I think. But I didn’t really want to take the chance.”

“No,” Liz agreed readily, and looked more closely at Helen. There were deep purple circles under the older woman’s eyes, and she looked grey with tiredness under her leathery tan. “Are you okay? Did you get any sleep at all?”

Helen smiled absently and shook her head. “I was worried about you. Wounds like that go bad easily, and you were running a fever.” Her lips quirked. “Saying all sorts of interesting things.”

“What kind of interesting things?” Liz asked warily, dreading the answer. 

Helen took a long time to reply.

“Don’t tell me I asked for my mother. We hate each other. It would be embarrassing.”

Helen gave the same half-smile as before, as if acknowledging the joke. “No. You love your family very much, though, don’t you? And your girlfriend. Very much indeed.”

Liz looked at her for a long moment, trying – not for the first time – to work out if Helen was sometimes deliberately vile, or if it arose from a very characteristic carelessness. “Yes,” she said finally. “I do.”

Helen busied herself with the half-filled water bottle some more, and at last said softly: “When I first went through the anomalies... well.” She gave the half-smile again. “It was an accident; I was running for my life. And Nick... I missed Nick very much.”

There was a long silence, in which Liz concentrated on her breathing, and the various calming techniques she had been taught as a child with a marked tendency to beat the stuffing out of other children who upset, annoyed, mocked or otherwise incommoded her adored little brother.

“Helen?” she said eventually, deadly and even.

Helen looked enquiringly at her.

“You were separated from your husband after an argument in which you threw a vase and two wine-glasses at him, and when you disappeared CMU was about to launch an investigation into you for screwing – and screwing over – your students.” Liz took a deep breath, Helen frozen where she knelt by the campfire, evidently not having expected Liz to know so much about her. “So, Helen, unless you want me to punch you again and break your fucking nose this time – never, ever, ever compare us again.”

There was a long pause. Liz sighed. “Now get some fucking sleep, will you?”

 

While Helen slept, Liz pulled a sewing kit from Helen’s rucksack and began mending her black t-shirt, which Helen had apparently washed. Liz wasn’t sure if she was glad or resentful, but the tear was extensive and her sewing skills were rudimentary enough that it took her some time to produce anything that might reasonably hold it closed. The result was a wavering mend with giant stitches that puckered the material, but Liz went over it three times and thought it would probably hold. A lone and scraggly wolf showed a brief interest in their camp as she laid her sewing aside with a sense of relief, and she stoked the embers of a self-sufficient pride that was currently in need of any sustenance it could get by getting up, wobbling menacingly to the entrance with a burning stick from the fire, and yelling and throwing stones at it. Liz had a pretty good aim: the wolf ran away.

“And don’t bloody well come back!” Liz bawled victoriously at its rapidly retreating backside, and turned on shaky feet to find Helen sitting up and eyeing her in confusion.

“There was a wolf,” Liz said, gleefully emphasising the ‘was’. 

“And you got rid of it,” Helen completed, and nodded approvingly. “Well done.” Her sharp eyes inspected Liz, who had grown a little steadier since she had first climbed to her feet, but not much.

“I will now sit down,” Liz announced with dignity, suiting the action to the word and jarring her wound. “Ow. Fuck.”

“Have some water,” Helen suggested, offering her a little white tablet to go with it. 

“Excellent idea,” Liz said, letting more relief than she realised into her tone, and dropped back into medicine-aided slumbers.

 

They spent a further three days in the Pleistocene, which were not particularly happy ones for Liz. They were delayed by a sudden thunderstorm which Helen said very definitely was too fierce for Liz to go out in, so Liz had time both to heal a little more, and to think about the events of the past few days and what they meant for her stay with Helen. The same was true of the long silent days of walking in which very little danger threatened to keep Liz’s mind fixed on her surroundings. Moreover, their small stock of painkillers had to be conserved, and because Liz was healing from a wound that hadn’t been very serious in the first place, she felt she couldn’t fairly take up any more. The constant ache, and when walking the constant teeth-gritting effort to avoid showing how much it hurt, wore on Liz and made her crosser and more resentful than usual – and since being kidnapped, her temper had been remarkably poor.

Liz was infuriated to find that she now owed Helen. Helen had dragged her to safety when she floundered, cleaned her wound, fed her, given her painkillers and sat up all night so she might sleep safely. She’d even cleaned her stained shirt, for God’s sake. Liz felt, and knew herself to be mostly unreasonable in feeling, that Helen could only have annoyed her more by mending the shirt itself – she’d seen Helen’s mending on her own clothes, and knew she’d have made a good job of it. If Helen had done that too, Liz thought she might have lost her temper with the older woman permanently; as it was she couldn’t help feeling like she’d somehow incurred a debt, that she owed Helen and that Helen would call in the favour at the most inconvenient moment possible. She knew Helen would take it as an advantage to be used in manipulating her, and was self-aware enough to realise she would be susceptible to the argument – up to a point. She would be the first to say that it was only what Helen owed her, after ripping her away from home and family. But she resented the fact that she’d given Helen even that little piece of ammunition.

Relative calm and friendliness aside, Liz thought viciously, heaving her rucksack onto her shoulders for the last section of this particular trek, she would be very pleased to leave the Pleistocene behind.


	13. Chapter 13

            The Choose Your Own Adventure anomaly was fascinating, but Liz really wasn’t in the mood to appreciate acres of grass with a myriad anomalies shining down on it. She was very grateful when Helen, after graciously allowing her a few minutes to gawp and looking affronted when she didn’t, forged ahead into one particular anomaly. Liz followed, with no very high hopes, and brought up sharply against Helen’s back in some small, dark space.

 

            “Do you just have a collection of anomaly-filled garden sheds about the place?” Liz demanded crossly.

 

            “I’ll have you know this is a garage,” Helen said with dignity, fishing about in the darkness until she found a switch to press. There was a rumbling and a slice of daylight appeared, growing wider and wider as the garage door retracted.

 

            In 2036, it was raining.

 

            “Bollocks,” Liz said miserably.

 

            Helen shot her a detestably sympathetic glance. “Come on. We’re only headed for the house.”

 

            She pointed at an imposing-looking building, which had at some point been an elegant Queen Anne specimen. It had since been extensively renovated. Liz wasn’t sure what to think about the glass wall.

 

            “Is everyone you know loaded?” Liz demanded.

 

            “No, but most of the ones that are useful to me are.” Helen dashed across a strip of gravel, and Liz chased her until she was huddling under a very small porch, shoulders drawn up to her ears. The door opened behind her, and Liz turned rather belatedly, to find herself staring down a very surprised man with a sprinkling of grey in his hair and skinny jeans on his legs. Liz wondered, unflatteringly, if all the guys of her generation would stick obstinately to fashions that were meant for teenagers.

 

            “Jack,” Helen said, smiling broadly.

 

            “Helen – how wonderful to see you.” His voice had a hesitance in it that Liz thought she could easily grow to hate. “What’s your, um –”

 

            “Niece,” Helen lied smoothly. “Beth Armitage. Beth, this is Mr Mayfair, a particular friend of mine.”

 

            “Pleased to meet you,” Liz recited rather dully. She wished Helen had chosen another alias: Beth, to her, was Kermit and Cara’s toddler.

 

            “Beth’s feeling a little under the weather,” Helen said, ushering her gently inside as if she actually were her niece. “Is your friend Chris around?”

 

            “Chris? Dr Donne? Yes, of course, I’ll call him,” Jack said blankly. Liz didn’t think much of his intelligence. “Why don’t – um, Beth, you go and take a bath and have a lie down, there’s a bedroom upstairs, I’ll show you, and I’ll... call Chris.”

 

            “That would be great,” Liz said, dropping her rucksack more heavily than she’d meant to. “Really, really great. Thanks.”

 

            Jack showed her awkwardly to a bedroom, which looked warm and comfortable, although Liz was not and never would be much of a fan of his taste in interior decoration. He pointed out the en-suite and its amenities, which included a very large bath, an equally sizeable shower, heated tiles and a full set of toiletries. Liz thanked him, and he edged away.

 

            She washed slowly and in only a few inches of water, in order to spare her injury, and cleaned her hair under the tap. She combed and dried it with some difficulty and half a bottle of detangler, then put a fresh bandage on her side from the first-aid kit under the sink, which was as well stocked with antiseptic and bandages as the rest of the room was with shampoo, conditioner, and soap. Then she wrapped a deliciously soft and fluffy towel around her and padded back out into the bedroom, where she found that the chest of drawers contained a stock of plain underwear and a set of soft cotton pyjamas that promised to be rather large on her. Liz had never been exactly chubby, but she thought they might fit her a little baggily. Only when she tried them on and the elasticated waist slipped to hipbones that were more prominent than they had been did she realise she’d lost weight.

 

            Oh well, thought Liz, too tired to fret about nutrition. She climbed into the bed and went straight to sleep.

 

           

            She was woken by someone’s incautiously opening the door, and froze, flat, still and perfectly alert.

 

            “Miss Armitage?” someone said.

 

            “That’s me,” Liz said, sitting up with care and suppressing a wince. “Dr Donne, right?”

 

            The man who came into the room was slightly younger than Jack Mayfair, but had a more weathered face, with lines about the nose and mouth. He looked about Lyle’s age, Lyle as she had last seen him – except that Lyle’s lines were from laughing, and this man looked sadder. Liz ruthlessly crushed a stab of homesickness.

 

            “Jack told me you were injured.”  


            “Yup,” Liz said, sliding out of bed with a careful eye to her pyjamas. “Here.” She lifted her shirt to shoe him the dressing.

 

            “Right.” Dr Donne shut the door behind him and put a medical kit on top of the chest of drawers. “Lie down on your side and let’s have a look.”  


            Liz lay down, leaving the dressing exposed. Dr Donne’s fingers explored the edges of it, and then carefully removed it. There was a small, significant pause.

 

            “Interesting. You must have been doing something exciting.”

 

            “Minding my own business.” Liz steeled herself not to flinch from his fingers on the edges of the healing wound. “Which is. You know. Really exciting.”

 

            “At your age it ought to be schoolwork,” Dr Donne remarked.

 

            “How much do you know about my aunt?” Liz asked.

 

            “Ellen? Less than I would like to. I’m going to need to clean this. Hold still. I do know what anomalies are.”

 

            “Okay. Well. She doesn’t think much of schoolwork.” Liz mentally reviewed the consequences of involving someone who was to all intents and purposes a civilian in Helen’s messy games. “You don’t need to know any more about her than that, by the – by the way.”

 

            “Sorry.” Dr. Donne had heard the hitch in her voice. “I’m afraid that hurt. How old are you, Beth?”

 

            “Sixteen.” Liz had an uncomfortable realisation. “Maybe seventeen. I’ve lost track of time.”

 

            “Are you allergic to anything?”

 

            Liz shook her head.

 

            “Any prior conditions I should know about?”

 

            “Nope.”

 

            “What’s your real name?”

 

            Liz cracked an eye open and scowled at him. “Beth Armitage. Try harder.”

 

            “It was worth a try,” Dr Donne said, unruffled. “This is antiseptic cream I’m putting on now, by the way. Whatever this is, it’s healing nicely. I’ll give you some antibiotics, though, I’d rather not take chances.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

“And if I were to go to the Anomaly Research Centre and say that a woman called Ellen Armitage has taken a minor through the anomalies against her will?”

 

“Your guesses are getting better,” Liz said, taken aback by more than one element of this speech. “You mean the anomalies are public now?”

 

“Have been for years. Want to answer my question?”

 

Liz listened for a while, just to check nobody had crept up on them. Satisfied, she replied: “They wouldn’t know the name Ellen Armitage. The name Helen Cutter would be different.” She flinched. “Ow!”

 

“So you are human after all. And what about your name? If it’s really Beth Armitage, I’ll be bloody surprised.”

 

Liz hesitated, caught between hope and justifiable wariness. “If they don’t guess who I am when you say she had a minor with her, they’ll know me from a description. As far as I know, I’m the only minor she’s... borrowed. And I know my disappearance will have come to the ARC’s attention in my time.”

 

Dr Donne worked in silence, using medical tape to attach a thick gauze pad to her side. Liz tugged down the shirt and thought of something which made her heart sink.

 

 “My, uh, Aunt Ellen. You’ve treated her before, right?”

 

The doctor nodded.

 

“And you never told anyone a thing. Never reported the wounds she brought in or the fact that she was travelling through the anomalies unofficially.”

 

Dr Donne nodded again, more warily this time, and kept his eyes on her as he packed away his medical kit.

 

Liz sat up, suppressing a twitch at the pain. “So what’s Jack Mayfair got on you, that you’re cleaning up after her?”

 

Dr Donne was very still.

 

“Something bad,” Liz said, watching him. “Something that could put you in jail... bring you up before the General Medical Council?”

 

He twitched slightly.

 

“Okay, _that’s_ it,” Liz said with satisfaction, and then paused, picking her words. “I don’t know how long we’ll be staying – and I doubt I can get very far like this, at least, far enough to keep away from Helen. There won’t be enough time for you to convince them you’ve got me and her, them to open a cold case, and them to get here before Helen realises what’s happening. Don’t risk your livelihood for something that won’t work.”

 

“Jack being Jack,” Dr Donne said evenly, “more than my reputation would suffer.” He paused. “Well, my reputation would be fine. What I did was illegal rather than wrong.”

 

Liz tipped her head on one side and frowned. “What did you do?”

 

“An elderly patient with a painful and incurable disease, whose relatives were badgering her to dispose of her money and assets in their favour and who had just got her will settled as she wanted it, asked me to provide her with an overdose of sleeping pills before one of her unwelcome guests could succeed. I did so.” He firmed his chin. “I don’t regret it.”

 

“Well, duh,” said Liz, whose arms couldn’t forget Jamie’s too-slight weight in his last minutes. “What did she do with the cash?”

 

“Royal National Lifeboat Institution – all several million pounds of it.” Dr Donne grinned, and looked suddenly much younger, coffee-coloured skin glowing with animation.

 

“How did Jack find out?”

 

“He was one of the relatives.” Dr Donne stood. “I’ll write you a prescription for some antibiotics, and – have you got basic painkillers?”

 

“Not to waste on this.”

 

“Short-sighted of you. You should get some of those, too, there’s a chemist in the village. And you need a decent meal and as much sleep as you can get.”

 

At this unfortunate juncture, Helen trotted up the stairs and walked in without knocking.

 

“How many times, auntie,” Liz said. “I value my privacy.”

 

“We need to be on the move again shortly,” Helen informed her. “Mr Mayfair needs reassuring of the quality of his investment.”

 

“Beth needs sleep, food, and antibiotics first,” Dr Donne said, developing a distinctly mulish look.

 

Helen looked as if she might argue.

 

“If necessary,” Dr Donne said, voice cracking like a whip, a show of backbone which impressed Liz, “I will go downstairs and tell Jack so _myself_.”

 

“You’d better do that, then,” Helen said coolly.

 

“Certainly. But first...” Donne took a glass of water from the bathroom, moving deliberately, and two pills from his medical kit. He held them out to Liz, imperatively. “Painkillers. Get them down you.”

 

 Liz obliged, and Donne nodded and walked away without acknowledging Helen. Helen cast an offended look after him, and a hard stare at Liz.

 

Liz shrugged, and wriggled back under the covers. “Doctors get a bit protective of their patients. Ever met – no. Of course, you don’t know Ditzy.”

 

The twist of Helen’s mouth said that she was acquainted with Ditzy, and had not met him in his endearingly principled mother hen mode. “I’ll leave you to sleep.”

 

“Thanks,” Liz said. “And... Dr Donne said the wound was clean and healing well. So. You know. Thanks. Because if it weren’t for you it wouldn’t be.”

 

Helen’s expression lightened a little, and she went away and left Liz in peace.

 

Liz lay in silence until the painkillers took effect and the nagging ache in her side receded, and she could fall asleep.

 

 

Helen, meanwhile, came down the stairs only a step or three after Donne, and was privy to an interesting conversation. Donne – who Helen thought had more spine than Jack, but unlike Jack was careless with potential blackmail material – was moving stiff and straight-backed, as if prepared for a confrontation.

 

“Dr Armitage tells me you’re planning an expedition.”

 

“A brief excursion. I like to check on my investments – no offence, Ellen, I know you’re trustworthy, but there’s nothing quite like an investor’s eye in these matters.”

 

Helen inclined her head graciously. Jack reminded her of another collaborator of hers, far closer to Liz’s time: weak-willed, vainglorious, a skilled businessman, with an easily exploitable weakness for women he couldn’t handle – except that Guy Ashburnham provided more concrete assistance than transfers of money and wouldn’t let her use his house as a base.

 

“You’ll need to postpone it a little,” Donne said, with a brutal matter-of-factness, and steamrollered Jack when he started to speak. “Beth’s young and strong and should make a full recovery from her injuries. But she needs food, sleep and medicine to make sure that happens.”

 

“Her aunt is prepared to take her out,” Jack objected, looking dangerously sullen.

 

“Dr Armitage is not a medical professional.” Donne crossed his arms. “I am.”

 

Jack leant forward in his chair, eyes cold. “That can be fixed.”

 

“I know,” Donne replied. “But I’m not prepared to risk my integrity for your threats, Jack. Keeping quiet about treating an injured woman is one thing – leaving a sick child to be put in harm’s way is another. Either you postpone your trip long enough for me to feed that girl and get her the medicine she needs, or I call the police right now and tell them you’re harbouring a civilian who’s going through anomalies unauthorised, and _she_ is holding a minor against her will.”

           

            Helen blinked rapidly. “What grounds have you got for these accusations?”

 

            “Enough to bring the police down on you.” Donne turned to her. “And when Beth talks, plenty more.”

 

            Helen thought fast. Could Liz have double-crossed her? “Beth is my niece.”

 

            “That doesn’t mean she’s with you of her own free will – or stop her being a minor. Choose, Jack.”

 

            “How long?” Jack demanded.

 

            Donne shrugged. “A few hours.”

 

            “Long enough to assuage your conscience?” Helen said, a mocking note in her voice.

 

            Donne met her eyes quite steadily. “Long enough to assuage my conscience.”

 

            Helen folded her arms and leant against a kitchen cabinet. “Was this Beth’s idea?”  


            “No,” Donne said cheerfully, though Helen could see him shaking under the strain. “But the fact that you think that’s a possibility is very suggestive. She told me her age and nothing else. In fact, she specifically told me not to confront you. But she’s my patient and I’m a doctor – that’s what you called me in for. So here I am, doctoring.”

 

            Gratefully, Helen abandoned, or almost abandoned - a decade behind the anomalies was not conducive to incaution – the idea that Liz had a daring escape planned, and was using the doctor. The girl still wasn’t keen, of course, still didn’t believe in Helen’s cause, but that would come in time. Liz liked her at least a little; she would not abandon her unless she got the perfect chance for escape, a chance Helen wouldn’t give her. Helen had made mis-steps in attempting to win her over, but that was understandable. For a girl whose defining characteristics were as simple as loyalty, a protective temper, and a highly assertive nature, Liz was remarkably easy to misjudge. It was for this reason that Helen went to check on her after Dr Donne had gone to fill his prescription, and found her deeply asleep, with no sign of an imminent escape attempt.

 

            No, Liz was still safely in her hands. And if Donne’s description of their conversation was accurate, she might even be growing trustworthy.

 

 

            Some hours later, just as the damp afternoon light was waning, Dr Donne cast a worried eye over Liz and reluctantly declared her fit to move. Jack, who had been growing increasingly impatient, got to his feet.

 

            “In that case, we can go.”

 

            “Certainly,” Helen said.

 

Liz had noticed Helen growing increasingly cool towards Mayfair in the hour or so she’d been downstairs, eating a meal Dr Donne had cooked for her, and being stood over by Dr Donne to make sure she ate it. Mayfair had been watching her as if intent on persuading her to eat faster, which had only prompted her to eat as slowly as was reasonable,  and Liz suspected Helen had been the subject of similar chivvying tactics – hence the increasing frostiness of tone.

 

            Liz laced her boots and swung her rucksack onto her back. The action hurt significantly less than it would have done earlier. “Well, I’m ready when you are. Sir.”

 

            Mayfair registered the ‘sir’ and preened, but with a distrustful edge that said he’d also registered the small, deliberate pause that turned the word from ‘person to be respected’ to ‘substance I scrape off my shoes’. Helen’s little smirk said she’d noticed too.

 

            “Good. Let’s get moving, then. I thought we’d take a little jaunt to the Permian, Beth.”

 

            “My _very favourite_ time period,” Liz said, unable to scour all sarcasm from her voice.

 

             “I knew you’d be pleased,” Helen remarked, and turned a dazzling smile on Dr Donne. “Chris. Thanks for your help.”

 

            “Yeah,” Liz agreed.

 

            “Glad to be of use,” Dr Donne said dryly, and picked up his medical kit. “I’ll be off, then. Have a nice trip, Jack. Take your tablets, Beth. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again soon, Dr Armitage.”

 

            “Bye,” Helen said, rather cool.

 

            Liz just nodded. She felt like her chances of escape were slipping away from her, and even though she knew this chance was a dud it was scary. She crushed an impulse to make a break for it. With the painkillers, she wouldn’t notice the pain sprinting would cause her...

 

            “Ready, Jack?”

 

            “Ready, Helen.”

 

            Liz forced her feet to turn and follow Helen and Jack Mayfair out to the garage.

 

            _Soon_ , she promised herself. _Soon_.


	14. Chapter 14

            The Permian was hot and dry, though from the sun’s position it was only midmorning. For Liz, it itched with memories, sunburn and sweat and the worst headache Liz had ever had, and she glowered reflexively. Jack Mayfair was wearing a look of greedy wonder on his face, which only made the glower intensify.

 

            “My God, Helen. It’s beautiful.”

 

            Liz rolled her eyes and kicked at the red dust and pebbles beneath her feet.

 

            “I know, isn’t it?” Helen said smugly. “Let’s walk a little, shall we? Beth, take point. I want you watching out.”

 

            Liz, who saw no help for this – and in any case didn’t want to be eaten because Helen was too busy talking business – did as she was told and moved off maybe twenty paces ahead. She spent most of the time keeping an eye on her immediate surroundings, but spared a thought for tracks and for any other signs of large animals; partly, she fumed at Helen’s choosing to bring her here only about a month after kidnapping her to the very same time period. They had come to the Permian through the Choose Your Own Adventure anomaly – surely there had been somewhere else Helen could have taken Mayfair, somewhere she knew as well and that would have impressed him as much.

 

            After about half an hour of these cheerful reflections, Liz looked back from one of her periodic checks on Helen and Mayfair – as ever, not sure whether she would rather see them strolling safely behind her, or in the throes of a death struggle with something nasty that would finish them both off – to realise that what she had taken for a large rock was a) moving and b) chomping on a bush.

 

            She turned casually, and, just to make her curse her inexperience even more, spotted the flattened depression of a very large pugmark. Liz contained a swearword in the name of stealth, and headed back to Helen. She was grateful to see that most of the tracks had been blown away or confused by the curiously hot wind that had been flicking grit into Liz’s eyes since they arrived, and the ones she’d seen had only survived because they’d been protected by a spiny succulent of some sort, suggesting they were quite old. Also, they were headed away from her, in the direction of the rock-that-wasn’t.

 

            She reached Jack and Helen very quickly; they were talking, and Jack, who was useless at paying attention to where he was going, walked straight into her. Liz held firm, and talked over him when he sputtered a curse at her. “There’s a very large thing that looks like a rock and is eating a bush, and tracks of something else that looks like it might eat us.”  


            “How fresh?” Helen enquired, sharp-eyed.

 

            “How would I know?” Liz returned, looking at the empty surrounding dust rather than Helen. “If it helps, the wind has blown most of them away.”

 

            “Oh, well that’s nothing to worry about,” Jack said confidently, and was on the receiving end of two identically stunned stares that actually did make Helen and Liz look related.

 

            “Beth,” Helen said without looking away from him, “Jack would like to see a dinosaur. We’ll show him the dinosaur that isn’t a rock, you’ll show me the tracks, and we will then return. Understood?”

 

            “Yup,” Liz said, and moved forward with Helen this time, more slowly, more cautiously, picking up on a quick jerk of Helen’s head and moving to cover Mayfair’s other side. She pointed out the tracks to Helen, who stopped, and grabbed the back of Mayfair’s shirt to stop him carrying on without them.

 

            “Look, dinosaur,” she said, indicating the object munching the bush and feeling much as she did when she distracted small children she was babysitting.

 

            Jack’s eyes lit up. “Can we go closer?”

 

            “No,” Liz said, looking down at Helen still examining the tracks, and grabbed the back of his shirt again when he went to move off once more.

 

            He gave her a nasty look. “I could make your life very difficult, you know.”

 

            She glanced up at him contemptuously. “Don’t be a fucking idiot. I’m here to keep you safe, not to keep you happy.”

 

            He sulked, but waited until Helen stood, dusting off her knees. “Gorgonopsid,” Helen said briefly. “The apex predator here. We should leave.”

 

            “Are we in danger?” Mayfair said, voice betraying a scepticism Liz knew Helen wouldn’t take to.

 

            Sure enough, Helen’s answering smile was full of teeth. “Yes. Not much, but I’d prefer not to keep you out here – under the circumstances.”

 

            “Of course, if you think it best,” Mayfair said ungraciously, but Liz could see fear and nervousness in the way he moved, and smirked.

 

            Helen led Mayfair back to the anomaly, Liz following at a distance with a wary eye to the surroundings. Mayfair was not a stealthy individual, and Liz could hear him complaining to Helen about her niece’s manners, which brought a derisive smile to Liz’s face. She couldn’t really afford to annoy Helen, but baiting Jack Mayfair provided a useful outlet for her bad temper.

 

            They left him at the doorway to his house, fumbling with his keys, and went back to the garage anomaly.

 

            “On the road again,” Helen said brightly, apparently energised by the events of the last few hours.

 

            Liz gave her a fishy look and no reply, and turned her back reluctantly on 2036.

 

***

 

            They had been travelling through a variety of prehistoric periods, Helen’s lectures on which had gone in one of Liz’s ears and straight out the other, for what Liz guessed to be weeks – so it was with deep suspicion that Liz joined Helen on the other side of yet another anomaly and found herself in quite a modern setting.

 

            Well. It bore a distinct resemblance to a space-age broom cupboard, but that was modern, as far as Liz was concerned.

 

            “When are we?” she asked, pushing a well-concealed door open and holding it for Helen, who merely smiled.

 

            “Okay,” Liz continued, pursuing Helen out of an empty lab and down a brightly lit corridor with a distinctive hospital smell of strong cleaning products, into which Liz did not wish to enquire. “Where are we, then?”

 

            “Some labs where I do a little research,” Helen said, eyes glittering. “Anomalies allowing. Of course, not all the questions I want answered fall within my area of research. It’s often more of a case of physics.”

 

            “Uh-huh,” Liz said, tuning out. Helen had been in the habit of doing this lately. She’d watched her very carefully for about a week after the visit to Jack Mayfair, and had then started to drop oblique hints. It was all Liz could do not to lose her temper with Helen when she became enigmatic, so she quickly stopped listening.

 

            “... except that I have a – minor disciplinary problem, shall we say,” Helen persisted, catching Liz’s attention.

 

            “Huh?” Liz said blankly, and added suspiciously: “Like what?”

 

            “You’ll see,” Helen told her, and looked momentarily grim.

 

            Liz wondered if Jon’s itchy thumb syndrome was catching, or if the butterflies dancing a reel in her stomach were only the consequence of good old-fashioned Lester suspicious bastardry. She had a terrible feeling about this.

 

           

            They finally reached something that Liz incredulously identified as a coffee room, although she’d never seen a coffee room so full of frightened people. There were at least forty of them, possibly more, roughly an equal balance of men and women, mostly wearing lab coats, lined up against the walls. That wasn’t counting the one man sitting on a ratty office chair in the centre, shaking like a leaf in a storm. He was flanked by a set of men Liz recognised – the clones, armed to the teeth, and their guns were levelled at the man in the chair.

 

            “What the hell is going on,” Liz said, words rather mild for the circumstances, but voice full of a suppressed fury that would have made any of her friends wince and Juliet leap into the breach to prevent a catastrophe.

 

            “That, Liz,” Helen replied, pointing at the man with a handgun she’d drawn from _nowhere_ , “is what a traitor looks like.”

           

            “Bullshit. That’s what a fucking petrified scientist looks like.” Liz spoke about the man, but her eyes were on the gun. They’d spent the previous night at one of Helen’s caches, and Liz had seen Helen messing around with one of the crates, but hadn’t thought much of it. Similarly, there had been something about the way Helen moved today that had bothered her, but Liz had ignored it on the grounds that there was always something about Helen that bothered her, and it was generally her existence. _How stupid can you get, Lester?_ she thought furiously, and knew with a cold certainty what Helen would do next.

 

            “He should be petrified,” Helen retorted. “He’s been selling on my research!”

 

            “His research,” Liz pointed out.

 

            “Research completed under contract to me,” Helen snapped back. “He’s been selling it on to the authorities. If I hadn’t been so thorough when it came to setting up this place – well, never mind.” She turned to Liz, and pushed the gun into her lax fingers with a smile. “He’s all yours.”

 

            Liz stared at Helen. She knew how to shoot, of course, and her fingers had fallen naturally into place around the gun, but her mind was sticking and she didn’t quite understand what was happening. She heard a noise, and vaguely identified it as the man in the chair, crying. “What the actual fuck, Helen?”

 

            “Kill him,” Helen elaborated, looking expectantly at her.

 

            “You can’t be serious.” How could Liz have forgotten Helen was unbalanced? How could she have forgotten Helen’s uniquely personalised take on right and wrong? Had she forgotten those things, or had she just failed to understand them until now, until Helen put a gun into her hands and expected her to kill a man for no better reason than that Helen said so?

 

            “I am,” Helen said, eyes steady. “It needs to be done. Don’t worry about him; he knew the risks when he broke my rules. Go on.” She smiled; it glittered. “Show us what you’re made of.”

 

            Liz’s finger was flat on the trigger-guard; she turned as if dreaming to the man in the chair, and looked at him as if he wasn’t real, though his bloodshot eyes and tearstained face were turned to hers, and as she did so her finger slipped inside the guard.

 

            It wasn’t an accident. Liz didn’t do things like that by accident.

 

            There was a long silence, broken by nothing more than the man’s hiccupping, thin sobs, and the sound of thirty people holding their breath.

 

            Liz settled into a shooting stance, lifted the gun, levelled it, and fired two shots into the ceiling.

 

            The silence broke with gasping and crying and sounds of shock, and the clones’ guns turned on Liz and Helen looked at everyone as if her world had suddenly spun out of control, which was fair enough, because it had, and then silence gripped everyone in cold hands and stole the words from their mouths again because Liz –

 

            Liz was pointing a gun at Helen and her finger was on the trigger.

 

            “When you kidnapped me,” Liz snarled, her voice twisted with hate, “you didn’t make me a _puppet_ , Helen Cutter. And I _won’t_ let you make me a murderer.”

 

            She slid her finger out of the trigger-guard, put the safety catch on, and tore the clip out of it and flung both clip and emptied handgun at Helen’s feet. Careless of the sights levelled between her shoulder-blades, she pushed open the door into the corridor, and walked away.

 

            Probably no-one noticed that her route back to the little anomaly broom-cupboard encompassed a lab impulsively entered – or that a small black hand-held device, the prototype of the one Helen used, vanished from a workbench there. Or maybe they were just too relieved she was gone to care.

           

***

 

            Three days later, Liz had yet to speak to Helen, and Helen had yet to turn her back on Liz. She’d sent the clones away; she had no other choice. They had never liked Liz – Liz’s stabbing her in the arm and bloodying her nose had settled that early on, and her antagonistic behaviour since hadn’t helped matters. But holding a gun on her... as far as the clones were convinced, that was the last straw, and Liz was a dead woman.

 

            Helen was sure she could hold them in check, but she didn’t want to have to, not every minute of every day. And she knew that although it was very unlikely that she would recover her lost gains where Liz was concerned – that she had probably lost the girl’s loyalty for good and all – she would have no chance of doing it if the clones were there, to remind Liz of what Helen was forced to ask others to do.

 

            She had honestly not thought it would be too much; Appleford was a traitor, and if there was one thing Liz reviled it was someone who broke their word. She had thought that Liz trusted her and would take her orders. They had worked so well together in the Permian – the last weeks had been so promising. Liz had shown encouraging signs of becoming exactly the right-hand woman she wanted her to be, and Helen had been excited, almost ready to congratulate herself on a job well done. If Liz had only killed Appleford, Helen would have been able to deal with everything else, could have assuaged her guilt, persuaded her conscience to believe what Helen sincerely did: that Appleford, who had known the risks, deserved to die. Even if Liz had handed the gun back and refused, then Helen could have made something of it, although it wouldn’t have been the triumph she really felt she deserved at this stage.

 

            But Liz had held a gun on her and sworn blind she wouldn’t let Helen control her, and that had carried more weight with Helen than any of the sincerely-made threats she had brushed away, as things of no moment, to be paid attention to and then disregarded as time wore them away. She was all cold contempt now, as they walked through the Devonian, to the cache where Helen had first given Liz the conditions of her captivity. She said nothing to Helen, she gave her nothing but a blank facade, she turned her back to Helen at every opportunity. She seemed to want nothing more than to make it clear to Helen how much she hated her.

 

            Some part of Helen acknowledged that she had a right to. Most of her was just disappointed, and incredulous, and looking for a way out – but the same part of Helen that admitted Liz had a right to hold her in contempt for the rest of her life knew that there was absolutely no way back.

 

            Helen had climbed the scree to the cache a hundred times. It was relatively treacherous, which was why she liked it; it made her safe space inaccessible and therefore immeasurably safer, perhaps one of the safest of her caches when its environment was considered, which was why she’d brought Liz here that first day. She knew every square centimetre of it like the back of her hand.

 

            She would need to be very preoccupied to slip and fall on it.

 

            She was.

 

            She swore loudly as she slid to the bottom, hands collecting small cuts and grit, mortified; and swore again as she tried to stand, and her ankle gave way beneath her. She breathed through the sudden sharp pain and tried to stand again, knowing it was probably only sprained, but she couldn’t do it. Badly sprained, then?

 

            From the top of the scree, Liz was watching her, a perfect blank mask, and Helen was forced to admit that she had no idea what was going on behind it. She was shocked when Liz dropped her rucksack, scrambled easily down the scree, got an arm under her shoulders and slowly, painstakingly, dragged her up the scree to safe ground. Inside the cave, she dropped her, and Helen’s bad ankle folded beneath her and she collapsed to the floor.

 

            Helen watched with incredulity as Liz busied herself around the cave, checking it for intruders and lighting a fire. She was even more astonished when Liz took out a first-aid kit belonging to the cache and cleaned her cuts and strapped up her ankle. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that Liz had forgiven her, but what on earth could the girl have in mind? Liz still refused to speak to her, but nonetheless this was kindness Helen didn’t have a right to expect, not any more.

 

            She got an inkling when Liz left her comfortably propped up by the cave wall with her foot elevated, and started to ransack the cache. The girl didn’t take a gun; she did restock and add to her first-aid kit, choose some more snacks, pick out another fire-starter and more fishing line and hooks, and pick out a thin fleecy jumper, which she stuffed into the top of her now bulging rucksack with some difficulty. She also chose a compass and an Ordnance Survey map of the UK, and quite casually took Helen’s map and a pen from her bag, and started to copy over the marks on Helen’s map. When she was done, she put the map back. There was no real ill-will in her posture or her face, but a bland distance that infuriated and saddened Helen.

 

            Helen tried to speak, but couldn’t.

 

            Liz put the map away, shouldered her rucksack, and bounced up and down on her toes until it sat right.

 

            “We’re even,” she said to Helen, voice rusty, and moreover full of something Helen didn’t recognise. “And I’m leaving.”

 

            Helen didn’t have too much dignity to respond to that – what she lacked was the words. She watched helplessly as Liz descended from the cache and walked away, and at last understood the different something in her voice, the confident set of her shoulders, the proud lift to her head and straightness to her back.

 

            Liz was free.


	15. Chapter 15

            Juliet could hear her name being shouted through the house, but she stayed curled into her corner of the loft. She’d opened the hatch with a stick, and used the fold-down ladder to climb up into the dark, silent space, drawing it up behind her and closing the hatch so that – hopefully – no-one could see where she’d gone.

 

            She’d come down in a minute. Honestly she would. She just needed some time. School had broken up weeks before, and you’d have thought she’d have plenty of time for anything she wanted, but she found her days slid past full of her mother worrying and her friends wanting to know where Liz was and Joel Stringer hanging around the place like he belonged here, and worst of all, the dreadful silence from all the house phones that said there was no news.

 

            “She’s been gone too long!” Simon had said when he’d come yesterday, looking for Liz who’d missed a cinema trip. “Juliet, I don’t mind if she’s ill, if she’s gone on holiday, whatever. Just – where is she?”

 

            When he asked, Liz had been gone six days seven hours and eight minutes and Juliet had no idea where she was. She had started to cry and Simon had panicked and spent the next hour ineptly trying to coddle her, trying to protect her from the awful truth he must have glimpsed behind her tears.

 

            Liz was gone, and she was taking a hell of a long time to come back. She might never come back at all.

 

            Today was Sunday; she’d been gone a week exactly. Juliet shut her eyes and curled tighter into the small space between some cardboard boxes, cushioned by old soft toys of hers, that she’d been hiding in for a while. Just a little while. Just a few minutes. She hadn’t thought her mother would notice that she was gone for much longer. After all, Emily had Joel to distract her, there was a paper in the throes of peer review she’d been worrying about, and she’d been out shopping, always a favourite pastime...

 

            “She’s not here.” Emily was close to tears, Juliet could hear it, and dimly, somewhere in part of her brain that she hadn’t simply shut down, she felt like she had to move, had to go to help her. “I’m going to call the police. This isn’t normal, Joel, she never does this.”

 

            “Don’t call the police, not yet. There’s a chance she’s just gone out for a run, or that she’s round at Liz’s, even if Liz isn’t there. Try calling James. Go on, I’ll join you in a moment.”

 

            Juliet could say this for Joel: he had quite a soothing voice.

 

            She heard her mother retreat downstairs, and then, to her distantly felt surprise, she heard him say: “I know where you are, Juliet Sayers. Are you coming down, or am I going to have to come up?”

 

            She tried to move and only a finger twitched. No good hiding now, no use. He knew.

 

            There was a sigh and an obscure swearword, and then Juliet blinked and screwed her eyes shut, blinded by the light, as the hatch was lifted upwards and shoved out of the way, and Joel swung himself up into the loft. Some part of Juliet, the part whose feet fell automatically into first position and who was intimately familiar with the properties of Deep Heat and ice packs, was quite impressed.

 

            “Where are you? Answer me.”

 

            There were no lights in the loft. Juliet could only see him dimly, a figure stooping slightly against the roof. She prised her lips open with difficulty and tried to speak; only a croak escaped from her dry throat, and she felt a shudder go through her and more tears slide from eyes that she could have sworn were cried out, the lashes gummy and tacky with it. It had gone wrong. People would be angry. She just wanted to be miserable in peace...

 

            “Juliet,” Joel said, slightly more concern in that level, cut-glass voice, and started to move boxes that she had climbed over lightly and easily. They would break under his weight.

 

            She focussed on working some saliva into her mouth. “Here,” she croaked finally, and tried to stir. Her feet and legs exploded into fiery pins and needles, and she didn’t have to work for the gasp of pain that escaped her.

 

            “Thank fuck,” Joel said, moving the last box and kneeling down in front of her. “Have you any idea how scared your mother is?”

 

            She’d brought a torch. She’d had that much common sense. He turned it on now, and turned it carefully away from her.

 

            She was still crying, silent and shaking, and couldn’t make herself stop. She felt a burst of self-hatred: _you hate him, you don’t want to look weak in front of him, stop crying, you stupid bitch, you can’t do anything right, no wonder they took Liz away_.

 

Joel brushed her hair off her face and wiped her eyes with the cuff of his shirt. Then he looked at her seriously for a moment, and scooped her into his arms.

 

Still stiff and frozen, Juliet had no choice but to let him hold her, and her tears flowed faster. “Fuck you,” she managed to sob after a minute or two, “don’t you know when you’re not wanted?”

 

“Yep,” Joel said, tone gentler and less flippant than usual. “Not known for paying any attention to it, though. And you know what else I know? Liz is coming back. We’ll get her back.”

 

He draped her plait over her shoulder so it didn’t dangle and get caught when he lifted her, and straightened up. “Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve had jackets that weighed more than you. What are you, forty-five kilos? When was the last time you ate a square meal?”

 

“Mum is going to kill me,” Juliet said, in favour of attempting a calculation that she knew would end with someone sitting her down and watching her eat her way through something filling and delicious that tasted like dust in her mouth.

 

“You know your mum better than I do,” Joel conceded.

 

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you admit to that,” Juliet snapped.

 

“No. It’s just the first time you’ve been listening.” Joel managed to unfold the ladder with one hand. “I guessed you were jealous, but I reckoned you’d work it out eventually. Just because your mother likes to have other people around too doesn’t mean she’s stopped needing you, you know? Can you get down this on your own, or should I carry you?”

 

 Juliet looked at the ladder and considered her own weakened limbs. “I can probably manage it.”

 

“All right. I’ll go first, then. That way if you fall you won’t break anything important. And then, sorry to have to tell you this, but you’re eating lunch. Because even a ballet dancer shouldn’t weigh that little for your height.”

 

“I am perfectly healthy,” Juliet said, stung.

 

“Maybe you were before Liz disappeared and you stopped eating,” Joel said briskly, climbing steadily down the ladder. “And you can tell me to go fuck myself in as many languages as you like. I still know worse ways of saying it than you do.”

 

Juliet gave him the evil eye and slid down the ladder, into the light.

 

It was perhaps unfortunate that when Juliet stopped at the bottom of the ladder, dizzy, and hung onto it until her head stopped spinning, the first thing she saw was the large picture of her and Liz hung immediately opposite. Her unfocussed eyes produced a reflection, Liz large as life standing in front of her, and she opened her mouth to speak, to smile – and she blinked, and it was gone.

 

And Joel was watching her with sympathy, the bastard.

 

Juliet opened her mouth to tell him to fuck off, and said “I miss her,” instead.

 

“I know.”

 

There was a long silence, and then Joel held out a hand to her. “Come on. You might have managed the ladder, but you’ll never do the stairs on your own.”

 

“Watch me,” said Juliet.

 

***

 

            Liz wasn’t scared that Helen would follow her, or cry out after her; she just wasn’t sure what she would do if Helen did. Turn back and tell Helen exactly what she thought of her? Keep walking? Pretend she couldn’t hear? Run, and lose Helen by the simple expedient of having two uninjured feet?

 

            She wasn’t sure she wanted to do any of those things.

 

            Fortunately, nothing happened. She just walked away, heading out into the slowly dimming Devonian light, and tried very hard not to burst out laughing. It was only the first step to getting home, of course, but how could this be so easy? As simple as Helen turning over her ankle, and Liz could fix that, and pay off all the scores between them – and then go. After all that angsting, and the terror that she’d never get the right chance, never find her way out, and then her escape route fell at her feet.

 

            A wide, incredulous smile spread across Liz’s face and made her cheeks hurt. It couldn’t be this easy, and yet...

 

            She walked for about an hour, and then chose a spot to camp, far enough from the water to be safe and in sufficient cover that she would see anyone coming before they saw her. She didn’t expect Helen to summon reinforcements immediately; she was almost certain Helen couldn’t. She might not send them after Liz, either – there was a fighting chance she didn’t want Liz back, now that Liz was no longer useful to her, and sending clones to kill one teenaged girl who could be anywhere and anywhen would be a waste of resources. Nonetheless, staying longer than one evening in the Devonian would be too dangerous to contemplate, and while she was here Liz meant to be careful.

 

            Bearing in mind what Helen had told her about the undesirability of the fish and the amphibians as meals, she went for more prototaxite, cutting as much as she could possibly eat and roasting it over her fire. It did have a sort of mushroomy taste and texture, which was refreshing after weeks of almost unrelieved meat. As a treat, she allowed herself a little of the dried fruit in her emergency store to finish off her meal; then she built up the fire and sat back to plan in earnest.

 

            Helen’s OS map was marked with caches and the anomalies that led to them, plus a few other anomalies – at least, insofar as Liz could work out the marks she’d copied down, that was what they were. There certainly weren’t enough marks to match all the anomalies Helen used on a regular basis. Confusingly, some were marked out at sea, but Liz assumed that that reflected different sea levels over time. She noted clusters in the Lake District and the general vicinity of the Forest of Dean, and earmarked the latter on the grounds that her eavesdropping over the past month or so (her heart twisted, and she consoled herself with the knowledge that she was free and heading home right now) had revealed that it was a key gateway of Helen’s to more modern times. Apart from that, Liz intended the map mostly as a means of marking her daily progress; good with numbers and tenacious, she had learnt years before how long her stride was and how to keep tabs on how far she was walking or running, and that would give her a general idea of how far she had gone each day. The compass she had taken would also be useful to keep her heading in the right direction, although she fully expected that it would be useless if she got anywhere near an anomaly.

 

            With some trepidation, she took out the black hand-held device she’d stolen from the lab and turned it on. She’d kept it a secret from Helen, and had consequently only managed to take it out long enough to work out that it was in working order and fully charged, with a spare battery in a compartment at the back. She still wasn’t quite sure what it was, although she had some idea that it was to do with predicting and mapping anomalies, and she was uneasily aware that it wasn’t an exact match to the one Helen had. From the few glimpses she’d seen, she knew that one had a colour screen; this one printed its results in black on olive, like a calculator. She couldn’t help wondering if that meant it was less advanced.

 

            Liz pushed these worries away. It didn’t actually matter; getting home would be a matter of luck and judgement to which the device wasn’t particularly relevant. The more she fidgeted with it, pressing buttons and exploring incomprehensible menus of options, the more she realised it could only help her find anomalies in general, not anomalies in particular. At last she found a small stubby aerial encased in plastic, which she pulled out, and the screen lit with a soft yellowish light and a bleeping noise came from it. Liz jumped, almost dropped it into the fire, and found the mute button after a bit of frantic scrambling here. It probably didn’t matter here, given that there would have been no time for anyone to start chasing her, and in any case the fact that she was sitting in the glow of a merrily blazing fire would have more impact on her safety than a bit of bleeping in the Devonian night. But it wouldn’t do to have the bloody thing squeaking at her in the night when there might be something that thought she was dinner and the bleeping was an announcement that she would prefer to be eaten medium rare.

 

            On the screen, an image of a radar appeared, cursor blinking round the circle, and then was replaced by what Liz recognised as a relief map of the surrounding area with a couple of stars superimposed on it. Liz stared at these for a moment before realising they must represent anomalies, and selecting them one at a time with some difficulty and careful manipulation of a small and fiddly joystick. This got Liz very little in terms of real information, apart from a set of co-ordinates which of course didn’t correspond to her OS map, something that looked like a countdown – thankfully, there was some kind of clock in the top of the screen, almost like on an iPod, or Liz had no idea how she would have worked out what the countdown meant relative to her – and, most confusingly of all, an empty box that said _actual kiloTemples_ and a filled-out one that said _predicted kiloTemples_. After boggling at this for five minutes (not only the inexplicable numbers but the fact that Connor Temple, who had spent all of his meetings with Liz tripping over his own feet, had some kind of scientific unit named after him) Liz’s rational mind suggested that kiloTemples must represent the strength of the anomaly somehow, and that the predicted box suggested how strong the anomaly would be, because it hadn’t happened yet.

 

            Liz frowned. She liked Physics, had taken it for AS-Level, and expected to get good marks; it had been one of the few subjects to survive her dismal GCSE performance with the mark originally predicted. She knew perfectly well that magnetic fields were generally measured in teslas or amperes per metre, depending. And anomalies were magnetic fields, right? And also, how was the black box measuring something that hadn’t happened yet? Was it working off previous readings? Where did those previous readings come from? She turned it over, looking for scratches and signs of wear. Had it been out in the field? Was Helen keeping some kind of a database of anomalies, and her higher-tech thing could measure as well as find them? 

 

            The only people she knew who could answer these questions were elsewhere. She couldn’t just make her way back to the lab where she’d nearly killed someone and ask nicely, and she was buggered if she was asking Helen for anything ever again. The science staff at the ARC were equally out of her reach, and anyway, Liz had a hazy idea that she’d fuck up the space-time continuum if she let Connor Temple know that he’d apparently had some kind of scientific unit named after him.

 

            Liz put the black box down in front of her. “Actually none of this makes any sense,” she said, only mildly cast down, and prodded it with a finger. It skidded a bit. Liz sighed. “Oh well.”

 

            Just so long as it pointed her in the right direction for anomalies. That was all she needed it to do.

 

            Liz’s plan was simple: it involved finding anomalies and walking through them until she found either an anomaly back to her own time, or one containing someone who could help her reach it. She was fairly clear on the fact that Helen had been messing with the ARC’s collective head with the greatest ease for years, and reasoned that therefore there had to be several anomalies back to the early 21st century – or Helen wouldn’t be able to hoppity-skip around them with her clones like Pinky and the Brain on crack. There had to be a way home.

 

            Of course, she told herself, trying to squash premature optimism and prevent a future crash that would make her miserable and achieve nothing, it would take time. Probably a lot of time. Probably longer than she’d already spent with Helen. But it was a plan, and it was workable, and she was free to pursue it, and that was a massive step forward from where she’d been even a day ago.

 

            Liz dozed off with a small smile on her face that she didn’t want to wipe away, and a feeling of relief she couldn’t shake.


	16. Chapter 16

 

            Of course, it couldn’t last. Liz had already told herself that several times over before she’d even cleared away her camp in the Devonian: the relief was temporary, and the stress of putting as much space and time between her and Helen as possible would probably wipe it out. Still, it lasted a full week of trekking through time periods Liz couldn’t name, dodging dinosaurs with more teeth than she liked which she couldn’t name either, and – on one surreal occasion – fleeing at speed from a giant flightless birdy thing which thought Liz was after its eggs. Liz had escaped that one by jumping into a river; the difficulties inherent in getting out of the river again and in drying off all her clothes and her kit were as nothing compared to being vengeful mother-hen prey. Luckily, the black box and OS map had been zipped into the pockets of her waterproof jacket and stuffed into her rucksack, and hadn’t got wet.

 

            Eating posed no more of a problem than it had done with Helen around; one of the few lessons on life behind the anomalies Liz had paid attention to had been the lessons on finding and cooking food, because she couldn’t care less about synapsids and disapsids but had very strong feelings about eating. She set snares, fished, and gathered vegetables when she could be certain that they were edible, which was infrequently enough that the part of her which had become health-conscious since making nearly all her own meals suffered from a certain amount of guilt. Getting hold of water was perhaps more dangerous, since predators tended to haunt waterholes and she now no longer had another pair of eyes watching out for something crocodile-shaped approaching in the water or a raptor lurking behind a bush. On the other hand, washing was infinitely less problematic. Liz didn’t care about being observed by wildlife, providing the wildlife wasn’t observing her preparatory to eating her; she cared a lot about being observed by Helen. The small microfibre towel she’d bought in Cardiff was great for drying off, but not so great at providing anything resembling coverage. Liz had hardly washed at all in the weeks she’d spent with the clones around, and had remained pointedly careful about cleaning off around Helen, which had made Helen laugh at her and parade around wearing exactly nothing on the one or two occasions they’d been somewhere where it was safe to stop and wash. That had been awkward.

 

            Only two elements of living in the past were significantly worse when she was alone. It was harder to sleep with no-one else to watch out for her, and after leaving Helen she only dozed unevenly, with brief periods of deeper sleep when she stopped in the midday heat because she didn’t want sunstroke, for fear of being attacked. That worried her: she knew she could function on little sleep, but was reluctant to test it while stuck on her own in a hostile environment. Secondly, she was slightly concerned that being completely on her own without a human soul for miles would make her more lonely than she already felt. She missed people, people in general as well as people specifically, so much that she thought it might eventually drive her mad, talking to the air or a stick or something and leaving her with too tenuous a grasp on her reason to make her way through the anomalies without either getting eaten or giving up. She was more scared of the latter than the former, on the whole; getting eaten would be sad, but it would be over quickly, she thought. Giving up would be tragic. It would mean drifting for the rest of her life, drifting until she couldn’t bring herself to stay alive, let alone try to find a way home.

 

            When she thought about either of these things, Liz invariably shuddered and found something else to do. But it was hard, given that most of what there was to do was walking across wasteland.

 

            Well – wasteland?

 

            The world behind the anomalies was objectively beautiful, Liz granted that much. She saw so many amazing things she knew she would remember none of them, and wondered if Helen kept a diary. Like most teenagers, she wasn’t quite the hardened cynic she believed herself to be – although she had more reason than most teenagers for thinking so – and she was far from immune to the strange beauty of plants and flowers she’d never seen before, or to baby stegosauruses trundling alongside their much larger parents, or the sight of a colony of small dinosaury things with nests like large molehills with eggs inside. She also found it much easier to appreciate the beauty of the stars when the only artificial light around came from her campfire, and she could see entire galaxies of them. Much of the world around her was curious, wonderful or both. There were moments when she could almost understand how Helen had come to love the world behind the anomalies so wholeheartedly, and how she’d infected men like Eaglescroft and Mayfair with her enthusiasm – Liz knew that wasn’t the whole of her persuasion, but she had a fairly shrewd notion that Helen would never rely on sex to bind conspirators to her if she had something less physical and easier to maintain long-distance to do it with. She thought it was ironic that she had left Helen behind, and only now she was seeing the wonder Helen had hoped to make her a convert with.

 

            Liz couldn’t kick the dust when she was trying to keep an accurate count of her strides. She walked faster instead, and traced long and wavering lines over her map, from anomaly to anomaly, sometimes forced to turn back when she realised the air wasn’t breathable, or it was too cold to risk, or when she saw that the landscape she had hoped to step into was in fact water as far as the eye could see (Liz told herself that she should have known to take the words ‘Jurassic Coast’ literally). Sometimes she would walk through several anomalies a day if she hit a cluster; sometimes it would be three or four days before she reached the nearest one. There were even days when she turned on the black box and no anomalies appeared, and those were the most miserable of all.

 

            Every anomaly brought new hope, and every prehistoric landscape brought new despair. Hope decreased with every anomaly she came to, and so did despair; Liz felt numb and desperate, as if she was settling into a terrifying routine. She took risks trying to make herself come alive again, tortured herself with thoughts of her family and Juliet, spent too long travelling in the darkening days when she knew it wasn’t safe, bent her mind to working out how long she’d been behind the anomalies until her brain was reeling and she was close to tears. She even visited a cache or two of Helen’s, pretending she was restocking, and hiding from herself the awkward truth: she was doing it because she knew it was risky, and she thought shocking herself with adrenaline might bring her fresh purpose.

 

            She was actually quite annoyed, therefore, when (having sworn she wouldn’t be doing it again) she found that the depredations of several small fish-eating aquatic dinosaurs had completely destroyed her stock of fish-hooks over what Liz indignantly estimated to be no more than a couple of weeks. Liz couldn’t stand eating meat for every meal, wasn’t prepared to fuck around making fish spears she’d have to stand from the bank to use because of the aforementioned small aquatic dinosaurs, and knew of only one place where she could reliably get fish-hooks: Helen’s caches.

 

            Crossly, Liz got out her map and worked out where she would need to go to get to the nearest cache. It took her two days of irritable walking, but at least she felt like she was going somewhere on purpose, somewhere she knew how to reach. It was comparatively easy to find the right anomaly and the cache, easy in a way it wouldn’t have been a few weeks ago when she had first started travelling on her own, and the fish-hooks – for once – were in an easily-accessible box. Nothing went wrong until Liz carefully climbed down three metres of sheer cliff-face with her new fish-hooks tucked into her rucksack, and froze.

 

            They were in the distance, small black figures steadily approaching, walking in formation. Liz’s heart thundered for a moment, but her brain tugged and yanked at it and forced sense into her mind and stillness onto her tongue; if Jon were here, if he’d brought his friends, if they were coming to rescue her, they definitely wouldn’t be walking in a perfect column in that weird robotic way. No, this was the personification of one of Liz’s worst nightmares, one she’d considered blindingly unlikely. The clones had found her.

 

            “Shit,” Liz said aloud. She was standing silhouetted against a beige cliff-face dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and a red t-shirt.

 

            There was a cry from one of the clones, and Liz took off like a bat out of hell.

 

            She had several hundred metres’ start on the clones, and made it through the anomaly she’d come through easily. Was there another one? she asked herself. There must be. _But it wasn’t marked on the fucking map_! Liz thought, charging into the fringes of a forest for some cover and nursing a strong sense of ill-usage. All she’d wanted was a packet of fish-hooks!

 

            She crouched behind part of a thicket, the anomaly clearly in sight but with plenty of space between it and her, and watched and waited. The clones acted on Helen’s orders only, or so she’d been led to believe, but Liz had watched them for a month or more and she knew that wasn’t always strictly true; sometimes they showed worrying signs of independent thought, or at least following directives that didn’t perfectly fit Helen’s intentions. And they absolutely hated her, she knew that much. She wasn’t safe if they were here and Helen wasn’t.

 

            Lacking a sheath that could be attached to her belt, Liz kept her knife tucked into the top of her boot at all times. Just in case, she drew it now.

 

            An advance guard of two clones stepped through the anomaly, and Liz saw one go back to call the others through. Adrenaline rushed through her system and she clamped down on it. She couldn’t kill or disable so many heavily-armed men with one knife, and she couldn’t afford to break cover by fleeing like a startled partridge. She started to creep away from the anomaly, slowly and carefully. She thought she had an advantage over the clones in that she knew the area, had walked through it and camped in it for the past two days, and although she had skirted much of the forest and rocky ground she was hoping to head into she still had a better idea of it than they did.

 

            She kept going as slowly and carefully as she could, retreating into the thicker forest. There was no point running; they’d only see her, and she stuck out like a sore thumb already. She could try not to add to it by making as much noise as an elephant crashing through dry leaves.

 

            Liz was successful in sneaking into the deeper forest without being caught, but she could faintly hear orders being given, and knew that her hunters would be organising, preparing to sweep the forest. Unless she could find somewhere to hide, she would be shit out of luck when they came looking- and it would have to be a _good_ hiding place.

 

            She thought she was in the foothills of some kind of mountain range – possibly one that no longer existed, possibly one that did exist, but was in a different place entirely to where it would be if she were standing on the same co-ordinates in modern Britain, tectonic shifts being the curse of the prehistoric time-traveller. Either way, the anomaly had opened onto a slope, and she was heading up steadily rising ground, between unbelievably huge trees with some patches of what looked like nothing so much as blackberry bushes. She could hear the clones moving through the forest behind her, didn’t know why they hadn’t spotted her yet, didn’t know – she forced panic back down her throat again, and kept moving.

 

            The sky overhead was the uneasy grey that heralds a thunderstorm, and there was a distant bass rumbling, slowly growing closer. Liz felt a certain agonised sympathy; she probably wasn’t going to leave here alive, and ‘uneasy’ quite accurately described her feelings about her fate, if you amplified it about a million times. When it started to rain, it felt distinctly like the least of her woes, but also like no help: it wasn’t as if it would make the clones stop.

 

            _Why haven’t they seen me yet?_ Liz asked herself. She was a moving target brightly dressed. Admittedly it had only been about two minutes, she’d taken advantage of all the cover she could get, and her red shirt had been dirtied to the point where it was unrecognisable as the scarlet it had once been, and her tracksuit bottoms were distinctly dingy, but still – red and black ought to have been immediately spotted.

 

            Liz caught sight of a large, deep hole crumbling out of the earth beneath one of the giant trees’ roots, and managed a split-second evaluation of her chances if she used it. On the one hand, not using it would probably lead to death, given that they had sub-machine guns and she had a grand total of one knife – she would back herself against any one clone without his guns with that knife, Tanya Lacey had taught her well and the clones were sledgehammers rather than precision instruments, but the odds were stacked against her. On the other, using it would mean that if they found her she would be toast; they would literally be shooting fish in a barrel.

 

            Liz decided that she would never be able to keep ahead of them if she stayed out in the relative open, and that death was more certain if she kept walking than if she hid. So she hid, going against all her instincts, which involved either turning on the clones and fighting until she was ripped to shreds (which would be a grand total of half a second) or trying to outrun them until she was ripped to shreds (Liz reckoned that would come to two seconds, which, although a 400% improvement, was still miniscule in the grand scheme of things). The hole beneath the tree-roots was thankfully unoccupied, and she was able to retreat into a small dark corner where she would only be visible if a clone actually stuck its head in and had a good look round. It was also damp, thanks to the rain which had just started and was currently in the process of rendering the ground a soup, which was only a selling point in the sense that Liz was able to use mud to render herself even filthier and even more part of the surroundings than she had been before. It almost made her nostalgic for cam-cream.

 

            Almost.

 

            She waited, silent and grim, rucksack also dirtied for camouflage shoved off her shoulders and knife drawn: she fully intended to try to kill at least one of the fuckers if they found her. She could hear the sounds of pursuit approaching, a slow and methodical search that made her blood run colder than it already was, her heart pounding in her ears and adrenaline jangling through her bloodstream. She thought her heartbeat was growing so loud that the clones would be able to hear it for one fanciful moment, and then realised that she had confused her heartbeat with the thunder, which was getting louder and closer. She very nearly giggled hysterically at the idea, and then jumped as there was a particularly loud rumble, and then a crash she had not counted on and a sound of crackling. The ground on the opposite side of her hideaway, not shaded by the earth covering her, suddenly glowed red, and Liz put that and the sudden scent of smoke together and understood that, somehow, a tree had been set on fire.

 

            Her temptation to laugh died abruptly after a shadow fell across the hole, and she stifled a scream, reminding herself that they wouldn’t be able to see her unless they shoved their heads into the space and had a good look round, and also that the direction the shadow was falling in meant the clone was standing right above her head – desperately scary in one way, but reassuring in another. She would be completely hidden.

 

            Liz waited, terrified noises she would be embarrassed to make caught between her teeth, and the shadow went away. There was some indistinct shouting she couldn’t hear, and then the words ‘search the wood’, and Liz instantly resolved to stay right where she was. Forever, if necessary.

 

           

            In the morning, she woke, and understood from this simple point that she must have fallen into a light and fretful sleep at some point, although how she wasn’t sure. It was no longer raining, and the forest smelt fresh and pleasant. She wished she could say the same for herself, but not only was she covered in disgusting mud, she hadn’t washed for a week. She was also cramped from being curled up in a very small space, freezing cold, and distinctly dizzy. She wondered if she was experiencing hunger or fever, and quietly begged anyone listening to make sure it was hunger. She could deal with that much more easily than she could deal with fever.

 

            In the darkness of her chosen hidey-hole, which was significantly less oppressive than it had been before, Liz listened with the tight nerves of panic for any noise that could indicate what was happening. She heard no clones, no nothing, and a couple of small noises she identified as animals after momentary jolts of panic that took three or four years off her life at a go, so she took out the black box and turned it on, more grateful than ever that she had got rid of the bleeping noises. She watched the familiar relief map as it zeroed in on her current location and that of the sole blinking star anomaly in the area, and noted absently that her guess that she was in some kind of seriously vertiginous area had been correct. Then she blinked and stared harder at the anomaly’s location; not only was it not the one she’d come from, but Liz had got very good at judging distances on this thing, and she could see it was also only a few hundred metres uphill of her position.

 

            Slowly, carefully, her spine itching as if she was being watched and fresh adrenaline running through her weakened system, Liz crawled out from underneath the shelf of earth that had been hiding her and straightened up, a process which just about allowed her to see out of the hole. She couldn’t see a single clone, which was good, and suggested that none of them were about, because if they’d been there they would probably have taken her out with a single headshot rather than risk the minimally greater fuss and bother of running her down.

 

            _Unless_ , Liz thought, _they want the fun of killing me close in_ , and decided that she could reasonably put her shivering that time down to the seriously scary thought of the clones taking her to pieces rather than the cold.

 

            Well. If they wanted to kill her with their bare hands, they would have to catch her first. Liz just hoped they wouldn’t be prepared to settle for a disabling shot that would leave her unable to run or defend herself, but then again, none of them was exactly Finn – she’d seen them shooting at creatures, and a good half of their shots went _completely_ wild – and it was bloody difficult to hit a running target.

 

            She squinted at the anomaly and decided it was definitely weakening, which pushed her into action. She heaved first her rucksack and then herself out of the hole, stood up and put the rucksack on – and when she heard a yell she bolted for the anomaly with the desperate strength of fear, even though she’d missed at least two meals and barely slept and was running on empty, her eyes fixed only on the glittering shards ahead as she slipped and slid in the mud and barely kept her balance. But then she was through the anomaly and a well-developed gut feeling for the bloody things told her that it was about to close, and then there was a flash of black in the corner of her vision and Liz lashed out with the knife tightly clasped in her right fist, and the anomaly shut.

 

            Staring at the corpse before her, which was missing everything from the shoulders up, Liz thought that it was a good thing that it had done so. She could probably have killed him herself, but not without being seriously wounded, and she definitely wouldn’t have survived the clones that would have followed him – particularly considering that she appeared to have landed in bleak tundra that reminded her unpleasantly of the Pleistocene and featured nothing resembling cover whatsoever. She had no idea what impact her blow had had other than forcing the clone back into the closing anomaly, although she had felt it connect and she was absolutely certain that she’d drawn blood.  Probably the clone’s comrades knew, if they were human enough to care.

 

            Liz wobbled, staggered, sat down hard and involuntarily, and threw up. She was strongly tempted to start crying, and even got a few tears out before they dried up out of sheer shock.

 

            “I killed him,” she said aloud and uncertainly, not sure whether it was accurate or not, and added dismally, “Oh fuck,” a comment swiftly followed by the loss of anything left in her stomach. Unfortunately, nothing as mundane as being violently ill could get rid of her increasing conviction that – whether or not she had actually killed it (him? She was confused now) – if she’d had a chance, she definitely would have done. And she would probably have been mostly okay with that afterwards, or at least, roughly as okay with it as she was now.

 

            There were times when she wondered if she was setting herself up to be as big a psychopath as Blade. Yes, fine, he’d wound up all right in the end, but there had been at least ten years of almost uncontrolled crazy before he’d pitched up with Lorraine, who was in the process of making an honest man with less of a knife issue out of him. Liz did not want to spend ten years as a knife-wielding crazy-lady everyone was scared of.

 

            “I don’t like myself,” she said rather plaintively, pushing her filthy hair out of her equally filthy face, and getting to her feet. There was no getting around how unwell she felt right now.

 

            “Shelter,” she announced. “I need shelter.” She knew perfectly well she was breaking all her rules by talking to herself, but felt that it was a lesser evil, comparatively speaking, than not comforting herself somehow.

 

            She took a step back, and another step, and another, and it got easier to walk away the more she tried, but it was hard, almost impossible, to turn her back on the clone’s corpse. And she didn’t know if that was because she was ashamed of what she was responsible for, or because she was still scared, even though it was dead.

 

 

            She kept walking as long as she could, until a biting wind cut through the jacket she had put on and her clothes, which had dried damp and cold on her skin, leaving her chilled to the bone. There was now no question whether she was ill or just very cold and very tired: she was ill, a minor sickness she would have shaken off at any other time, if she’d been better fed or had access to somewhere warm and safe. But there was little to no shelter and she was cold and very hungry. She had missed two meals: she was going to miss a third, because she couldn’t hunt and there was nothing to scavenge.

 

            She stumbled to a stop in a small dip in the land that might give her more shelter from the wind, knowing she couldn’t go on much longer, and there was nowhere in particular she could go on to. There was no firewood, nothing that would burn and keep her warm, the small straggling bushes sharing space with her too little to be of any real use; she felt her breath hitch with tears as she pulled out everything warming from her rucksack that she wasn’t already wearing, the bivouac bag strapped to it, the sleeping bag, her extra t-shirt to wrap around her head and ears. She didn’t realise she was talking to herself until she drank some water, her hands shaking so much she nearly spilt some on herself and swore, and her curses interrupted what she was saying to herself.

_I’m not going to die here. I’m not going to die here. I’m not going to die here._

 

            Liz swallowed back tears and stuffed her mouth with biltong and dried fruit, in a desperate attempt to avoid thinking, or at least to have something to do other than think. She climbed into her sleeping bag, taking advantage of all the cover she could get or make herself, and curled into a ball with her hands tucked under her armpits to keep them warm.

 

            _I’m not going to die here_ , something small and desperate in Liz’s mind said, _I’m not going to die here_ , and Liz officially reached the point where she couldn’t tell the difference between shivering with cold and shaking with fear.

             

            Her lips formed the words _I’m going to die here_ , and her eyes creased with misery and her lips drew back over her teeth in a silent scream, because she knew it was probably true.


	17. Chapter 17

She was genuinely shocked and deeply suspicious when she woke up. She felt weak, but not in the same way she’d felt before; this was the weakness of recovery rather than sickness. She was warm. And there was a small fire quietly burning down just in front of her, along with a couple of airtight containers, and three words scratched into the thin soil in large letters:

DON’T GIVE UP.

Liz used some words she had learnt from her stepfather, and sat up. Something slid inside her sleeping bag, and she freaked out temporarily before grabbing one and hauling it into the light and recognising, with disbelief, a single-use heat-packet which was slowly cooling down. It was one of several: some had been tucked down by her feet, others pressed against her stomach and her armpits. And there was an honest-to-God woollen beanie on her head.

“What the fuck is this shit?” Liz demanded comprehensively of the empty sky, and crawled out of her sleeping bag and up to the lip of the depression she’d gone to sleep in, and looked around. There was absolutely no-one in sight. 

She slid back down towards the fire, and wrestled with the airtight containers for a few minutes, finally wrenching one of them open, only to find something that strongly resembled a boil-in-the-bag meal, cooked and locked away somewhere it would stay warm and the local fauna wouldn’t get too curious. She dipped a finger in, and tasted chicken curry; the other container turned out to have rice in it. Filling, sort of healthy, and in quantities large enough to make her very sick indeed if she tried to eat all of it in one go.

Liz put the containers down, and thought very hard about this.

She was ninety-nine point nine percent certain this wasn’t a gift from the clones. They’d just gone to extreme lengths to kill her, and she hadn’t been backward in returning hostilities – and anyway, she was pretty sure they couldn’t write. If it had been the ARC, they wouldn’t have fucked around leaving her on her own with cooked food, a fire and a message of hope; they would have carried her home, and she would have woken to the sound of Ditzy swearing at her, which suddenly sounded like the best way to wake up ever (a title previously held by snuggling with Juliet in the early mornings). The handwriting didn’t look like Helen’s, Ethan Dobrowski wouldn’t piss on her to put her out if she was on fire, and she didn’t think Matt Anderson had the resources to be doing this kind of thing: no traveller with any common sense would try to carry their food with them in the form of boil-in-the-bag meals, or bother with disposable heat-packets, and very few would carry airtight containers. And all of them would have hung round to collect the containers afterwards, if they were disposed to be friendly towards her, unless there was some compelling reason why they didn’t want her to know who they were. Helen wouldn’t have such a compelling reason; protecting her would fit perfectly into the narrative of a selfless mother figure she could adopt to make herself look better. 

Liz looked at the handwriting, and thought that it reminded her of nothing so much as her own, which nearly precipitated a minor freakout, until her stomach rumbled and reminded her just how hungry she was. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said, and took a drink of water and started to eat a very, very small portion of curry and rice. What was that they said on Doctor Who, about time being a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff – something like that – anyway, this was weird. Even weirder than being kidnapped by an unhinged female wanting to make her the closest thing to a Doctor Who companion in existence, except with significantly more killing people, and that was saying something. “What have I done to deserve this?”

Done to deserve what? said a small, tart voice in the back of her head that Liz didn’t often listen to, because she avoided introspection like the plague. Being alive? Oh, boo hoo. Poor you. How you must suffer. Anyway: that was cut with a knife. It could have been anyone. Just because it looks a little like your writing is no call to get all over-excited. Shut up and eat.

Liz told the small, tart voice to shut up, and finished her meal; then she locked away the rest in the airtight containers. She planned to rest for a few more hours, eat a little more, and then move on while the sun was still in the sky and find some shelter. The black box told her there were no anomalies today; in a way, that was a relief, because while she felt like she might live now, she didn’t want to go anywhere in a hurry. She wasn’t even sure she could go anywhere in a hurry. She felt a bit like a wet noodle.

Some time in the afternoon, she decided she could manage an hour or two’s walking, had another small meal, and packed her things up. She took the containers with her, although it meant rigging up an interesting contraption with thin black cord and duct tape to carry them; the food was still good, and she couldn’t afford to pass up a free meal. She wasn’t yet sick of curry, either. She thought when she got home the first thing she would do, after flinging herself at her family and sleeping for hours, would be to hit the kitchen and cook properly for the first time in weeks.

 

Liz had no more trouble for some days, although she had to cut down on her travelling time because, after her sickness, she got tired more easily; she also became slightly obsessive about finding shelter as early as possible, and building a proper fire. She knew she was recovered when she fled from a T. rex that had been far more interested in a puny canapé of a human than logic suggested it ought to be, managed to get ahead of it and hide in a thankfully unoccupied burrow until it lost interest, and still walked another two miles before stopping that day, but she couldn’t help the instincts that told her she couldn’t risk another such mistake. She had come very close to dying of exposure. If it weren’t for her unknown benefactor – it was easier calling them that than ‘my possible future self, this is creepy’ – she would have frozen to death, and no-one would ever have known what had happened to her.

Liz kept a close eye on her mental state, remembering the words DON’T GIVE UP and knowing that losing hope would be the quickest way to lose her life (and also, perhaps, remembering that if the unknown benefactor had been herself say ten years on, she survived, and had something to hope for). The only problem was that she had little to no idea what to do when she was upset to stop herself becoming dangerously depressed; she was still in counselling after Jamie’s death, but it was sort of a work in progress, and her coping stratagems were all pretty specific. For once, her dead brother was not the problem. She had lots of problems, but not that one.

She could almost hear Jamie laughing at her for that. It would have been the kind of thing to make him go into full-blown, can’t-stand-up, can’t-breathe hysterics, and it was probably testimony to her counsellor’s skills that the thought made Liz giggle, rather than cry.

 

One day, the enforced inactivity of an anomaly too far away and too weak to bother with - there was no point trekking twelve miles just to get to an anomaly that didn’t exist any more when she’d found a safe and comfortable shelter under a rocky overhang – had her feeling particularly low and irritable because she couldn’t just walk it off. Having completed a hundred press-ups and a hundred sit-ups, something which made her go red-faced with effort and wheeze, lying flat on her back on the ground, because it had been far too long since she had hit the gym or done anything resembling a traditional muscle exercise, she decided to attempt an epic undertaking: a bath. 

Or at least a proper wash. 

Or, fuck it, a rinse with some warm water or something, because Liz had no soap. There was probably a super crafty way of making some, but Liz didn’t have a clue how to go about it. Getting water from the nearby stream and heating it up was enough of a challenge, let alone washing her clothes in the river water. The latter was always a tricky proposition: Liz remained deeply sceptical of the various varieties of fish to be found in such places after an incident when one had swum off with a pair of knickers, which had promptly been torn to shreds, precipitating the removal of the remaining items of clothing and Liz’s vulnerable fingers from the water.

Still, it was warm, and there were no predators to be seen; the only creatures in the vicinity were some very relaxed-looking herbivores. She stripped off completely for the first time in days, spared a thought and a wrinkled nose for how badly she must smell, and started to wash in a rather piecemeal fashion which nonetheless got a lot of dirt off her and left her feeling positively refreshed. When she’d done a spot of impromptu fishing and accomplished her clothes washing as well, laying the latter out flat to dry on several particularly sunny and inviting rocks, she began to feel almost smug. She skinned and gutted one of the fish, skewered it, and put it to roast on the fire, before attempting what she anticipated would be the most difficult task: cleaning and brushing her hair.

Helen kept her hair very short; there was a limit to what could happen to it. Liz’s, however, was consistently at slightly below shoulder-length simply because she could never be bothered to think of anything imaginative to do with it or settle on a short style she liked, and consequently had posed a problem since she’d started travelling through the anomalies. Happily, it had been up in a ponytail when she’d been kidnapped, so she did have something to tie it with; she’d settled on plaiting it, reasoning that it couldn’t get too tangled in a plait and couldn’t disgrace her by looking hideously greasy, even when it was hideously greasy. However, Helen had not provided her with a comb, and she hadn’t thought to buy one in Cardiff; she’d gone for weeks doing very little other than finger-combing her hair, which did not work out the tangles. She had stolen a comb from Jack Mayfair’s well-stocked guest bathroom, thinking that he wouldn’t notice and not much caring if he did, but had had hardly any opportunity to use it. Her hair hadn’t been washed since the day before the regrettable incident in the lab, and she had last stopped to try to get a comb through it two days after leaving Helen. She had then plaited it, and hadn’t touched it since, except to redo the last section of the plait when it threatened to come undone. Since then, it had been doused in water, covered in mud, exposed to biting wind, and generally completely ignored by Liz herself. The only easy part of dealing with it was getting the hair-tie off, which involved a bit of tugging, some cursing, and tiny snapping sounds as strands of hair which had got wrapped around it broke. Liz then expected the plait to fall apart, or at least to loosen, but... apparently not.

It was completely matted. Liz could hardly get at it with her fingers, let alone the comb. After ten increasingly confused minutes of tugging at it and feeling as if she were going to rip chunks of her hair out at the scalp, irrational fury that her hair wouldn’t do what she wanted it to overtook her, swiftly followed by anger that she cared at all, and then very sudden misery that she couldn’t make anything go right and had failed to take care of herself even in this.

Liz buried her head in her hands, took the fish off the fire - because James Lester had bred an immovable streak of practicality into his daughter and mere emotion was not going to stop her feeding herself – and then brooded some more. She decided to leave it until she’d eaten, in the vague hope that some of the tangles might loosen now that the plait wasn’t tied together, and gathered her drying clothes in and ate her supper. Only then did she attempt to do something about her hair again.

Liz was (probably) seventeen years old. The fact that leaving it alone to fix itself had done absolutely nothing did not come as a surprise; she just found it depressing.

“Useless,” she muttered, and then said it again louder because she didn’t feel like she’d got her point across. She blinked hard and stared at her fire, trying to make her mind collect itself rationally when she knew that the last thing she was right now was rational. She had two options, logically speaking: leave it alone to fester or get shot of it entirely.

Liz had the knife in her hand almost before she knew what she was doing, and without really thinking it through, she cut through the entire braid right at the top. It required a minimum of sawing, but Liz still felt mildly cheated, as if it ought simply to have come straight off. If her life were a movie, it would have done.

If her life were a movie, she would have been home by now.

She chucked the severed braid aside and combed tentatively through the loosened strands with her fingers. They were much less matted, maybe in a position where she could comb through them, and the position improved further as Liz clumsily trimmed the longer front bits in order to keep them out of her face. She hacked at her new cut with a comb and some water until it was mostly tangle-free and nearly all out of her eyes, and then told herself that that would have to do and went to get some uneasy sleep.

Not long afterwards, after a surreal day in which she’d trekked across a salt pan to walk through an anomaly and had found herself ankle-deep in the edge of a very still lake, Liz caught sight of her own reflection in said lake, and stopped to stare. She barely recognised herself – face weathered and trimmed down to the bone with hunger, body significantly thinner with hollows and muscle lines in places where flesh and puppy fat used to smooth them over, hair cut raggedly short, skin tanned dark. She looked entirely different, with only a ghost of herself behind her own features.

Liz, exercising carefully honed instincts she didn’t know she’d learnt, spotted the V trail of an approaching predator out of the corner of her eye and bolted for the shore. She didn’t recognise that as part of her, either – but she had a horrible feeling she was stuck with it.


	18. Chapter 18

            Nobody, Liz Lester thought viciously, carrying several unwieldy bottles of river-water to be boiled and an armful of firewood, ever warned me how _boring_ time-travel can be.

           

            It had been, as far as she could tell, about three weeks since she had cut her hair, the best part of two months since she had left Helen behind, although she was as fuzzy on the timings as ever. She’d had more than a few days where she’d essentially done two days’ walking in one period of being awake, and though she was pleased she had the strength for that still it was both a deeply unpleasant experience and a bugger for confusing the time. She had totally lost track of the date, but was pretty convinced that she was now seventeen – she’d been a month and a bit off her birthday when Helen had kidnapped her. She just hoped that she would get back before her actual birthday, or her family and Juliet would be miserable, and the very thought of that made part of Liz quail.

 

            In the last three weeks, nothing that was interesting or exciting had happened at all. She had done a spot of scavenging, which had threatened to become rather too exciting when something cat-like with large teeth showed an interest in the same carcass, but the cat-like thing had preferred the ready-dead prey to the small thing on two legs that didn’t have any meat on it anyway. She had nearly walked into something that looked suspiciously like the Dark Ages, but the sight of a small church and noise of an attendant funeral had clued her in and she had headed back to the anomaly at speed, slightly worried that she might have caught the Black Death or something. (It was airborne, right?) She had had a few glimpses of clones, which had made her heart jolt and her feet carry her a long way in the opposite direction, but they never saw her and there were long gaps between her seeing them, so she was almost sure that they weren’t actively hunting her. It was even possible that they thought she was dead, considering that their colleague had followed her through an anomaly ready to strike and there was no reason for them to know she hadn’t given him time to fire before she’d knocked him backwards and the anomaly had closed on him.

 

Apart from those thrilling events, however, there had been nothing of interest except the usual grind of finding food, finding water, finding shelter and sleeping very poorly indeed. She had a new appreciation for Helen: not only had the woman managed to keep some sanity when Liz’s felt as if it was slipping through her fingers with every fresh lonely day, but she had also survived on so little sleep, and with the constant disjunction of either everything trying to kill her or everything leaving her alone.

 

            She was also experiencing extreme frustration in her attempts to head towards the Forest of Dean, where she knew there were a lot of modern anomalies – after all, Lyle was always doing rotations down there. But anomalies were no respecters of geography, and Liz could try to travel in the right direction all she liked, but she remained at the mercy of the anomalies, and they dictated where she went. She was not prepared to risk travelling a long way in one direction, only to find herself in an anomaly-free wasteland; she didn’t know how far the black box’s signal could go from her location, and as far as she was concerned the really important thing was to keep going through anomalies, because she thought that gave her the best chance of getting home. Her progress south and west, if she had been able to mark it on the map, would have looked like a drunken spider illustrating the saying ‘one step forward, two steps back’. 

 

            But she was still alive, and more or less heading in the right direction. Count your blessings, Lester.

 

            That particular day, she had found an anomaly within a few hours’ walk, and was preparing to head towards it – after washing some things which had fallen foul of a nasty-smelling swamp the previous day, and airing out other things, like her jacket and trainers, that had been stuffed at the bottom of her rucksack for a week or more and were consequently a bit stale. She’d also wanted to stock up on clean water, reminded by a trek south over a desert she’d definitely seen before that it was the most vital piece of equipment she had. And she saw no special reason to hurry towards an anomaly that, she was almost certain the figures on the black box were telling her, was strong and steady.          

 

            She set to boiling the water in her newly built-up fire, always a slow process, and packed up the jacket, which was now – if not daisy-fresh – not as stale as it had been before. She turned over the drying clothes, and nibbled cold cooked meat for breakfast while she waited for the water to boil. It was rubbery, but she didn’t make a face. She was increasingly used to bad food, although she did find herself missing her kitchen and her freedom to cook and eat whatever the hell she could buy at the supermarket quite frequently.

 

            Typically, it was just as she had boiled the water and was attaching it to her rucksack, silently congratulating herself on her domesticity, that a gaggle of very small raptory-type things stampeded through her camp. Liz flung herself upright with a cry of fury, but the creatures weren’t interested in her, although one squalled as it trod in the fire and deservedly got its feet burnt; they did, however, charge across her drying clothes and completely wreck her tracksuit bottoms, tearing large holes in the battered fabric, and one actually stopped to chew on her trainers. Liz stared at it with mounting disbelief and indignation, and then sensibly asked herself what had stampeded them; she grabbed a stick from the fire and a large stone just in time to be confronted by a slightly larger raptor, which gave up on its prey when it had a burning stick shoved into an eyesocket, a stone bounce off its withers, and several unspeakable oaths hurled at it.

 

            “And as for you-!” Liz bellowed, turning on the smaller raptory-thing which had been nibbling her trainers, only to find that it had run away and taken one of the shoes with it.

 

            “I hope it chokes you,” Liz said viciously, dropping the stick back in the fire and smothering it with her now-useless tracksuit bottoms. The other trainer, useless without its pair, she flung as far as she could in the opposite direction for the relief of her feelings, which did nothing to help other than strain a muscle in her dominant arm, leading to another outburst of cursing.

 

            She packed up the remainder of her things, cheerful mood well and truly gone, and checked the black box to make sure her destination was still present and correct. It was, so she stamped off in its general direction, mentally promising herself that any dinosaur that got in her way would be toast before you could say ‘tyrannosaurus rex’. Even if it was a tyrannosaurus rex.

 

            It was possible that the flora and fauna of the place where she was – which Liz had pegged as ‘somewhere sort of Welsh’, but that didn’t explain the plunging canyons of orange rock, and Liz was perfectly prepared to admit that she might well be standing on a bit of Pangaea instead – listened to her silent curses and stayed out of her way. It was, however, significantly more likely that Liz was travelling during a part of the day when they weren’t very active, or through an area that wasn’t hospitable, or somewhere that was in fact in the middle of an extinction event of some sort. She passed a gushing river, the water of which was ice-cold and possessed of a current that made Liz feel as if she would be dragged in even from the bank, and climbed up the side of a steep gully in order to make it to the anomaly, which was glittering tantalisingly on the very edge of the bank. Liz gritted her teeth and reminded herself that there would probably not be another very steep drop on the other side of the anomaly, and she could always stick her head through to check, and it wouldn’t mean she was falling to her death. But when she put her head through, instinctive trepidation still made her blood cold, and it was very disconcerting to see on the other side solid, orange, sandy ground with scrubby thorn-bushes in it. Liz decided not to withdraw her head before going through properly, it would only make her feel slightly sick, and in any case she would be happy to leave behind such a disobliging time-period. She was still bloody annoyed that a squeaky little lizard had successfully wrecked her change of clothes, and some of the only things she had left from her own home. Everything else was basically property of Helen, or stolen. Or bought with Helen’s money.

 

            The land on the new side of the anomaly appeared to be absolutely chock-full of thicket. She wasn’t sure if she’d just stumbled into a very scrubby forest, or if she was working her way into a prehistoric bramble patch, and she was even less sure what had happened to the canyons and the river. Not for the first time, she wondered if anomalies did sometimes take you to a different place as well as a different time, and contemplated the prospect of accidentally appearing in a warzone rather than rural Britain with misgiving.

 

            Eventually, she fought her way out of the thicket she had walked straight into and found herself in a mosaic-like environment, patches of open ground with small stones and soft chalky orange dust that she knew from experience coated everything it touched and refused to be scrubbed off, and small stunted trees with tiny green leaves outmatched by long thorns, as well as the ubiquitous thickets. Liz patted herself on the back for having stocked up on water, because she couldn’t see or hear a source nearby, and consulted her compass – which by now was far away enough from the anomaly to work. She found, of course, that she had been going in entirely the wrong direction, so she cursed a bit, turned round and blundered back much the way she’d came, only skirting the thickets. She already had a couple of shallow scratches on her arms and a minor rip in her shirt, the legacy of ten minutes entangled in a particularly nasty bush, and one that she planned to sew when she stopped to let the most intense heat of the day pass her by; here it couldn’t be more than three or four hours after dawn, and the sun wasn’t yet baking her. Liz was no wimp when it came to the heat, but she saw absolutely no reason to risk herself by walking continuously in what she judged to be 38 to 40 degree heat; it wasn’t as if she was in a hurry to get somewhere specific with a time limit. She usually didn’t go through more than one anomaly a day.

 

            She found the landscape she was wandering through depressingly featureless, apart from the trees and thickets, and although she knew exactly how far she had walked – counting paces now being an instinct which she wasn’t sure how she’d get rid of, once she got home – she was having difficulty understanding it. The landscape never seemed to change; there were no landmarks to judge by. It wasn’t completely lifeless – Liz had caught sight of small, tawny lizards scuttling away from her – but it was the next best thing, and Liz wondered with misgiving what she was going to eat for supper.

 

            Crossly, she squinted up at the sun and judged that it was now directly overhead, and she should stop for an hour and take stock. She managed a loo break (a tricky proposition, given all the thorns, but at least she didn’t need to worry about preserving her modesty by hiding, seeing as there was no-one around) and then had a drink of water, before mending her shirt. It was the same black one that an arrow had torn in the Pleistocene, and it was, by now, a patchwork of amateurishly mended rips and holes. The same was true of the red shirt, but considering that the only thread Liz had was black, it looked much less artistic, interesting and blindingly obvious on the one she was currently trying to fix.

 

            After the hole was mended, and Liz’s minor scrapes cleaned and daubed with antiseptic, she took another gulp of water and peered at the sun under her shading hand. She had managed a spot in some relative shade, the ground dappled with skeletons of shadow, but that had meant perching uncomfortably on her rucksack to avoid thorns the trees had shed, and she was generally uncomfortable. She guessed that the sun had almost moved on far enough for her to risk moving on too, and killed another ten minutes by checking on the black box. To her surprise, it was signalling two other anomalies, one much closer than the other and with a stronger signal, because it was actually open right now and not just a predicted anomaly; it was only a couple of hours’ walk, and Liz hoped that the world on the other side of it would be friendlier in terms of finding food, and also less boring.  

 

            But not _too_ much less boring, she added hastily, in case she was jinxing herself, and started off again.

 

            Very rarely did Liz come across a place where more than one anomaly was available, but it always made her heart twitch and burn in her chest wondering if it would have been the right one, if by going through the other anomaly she was wasting her chance at going home. In this case the problem didn’t arise, because the other anomaly wasn’t open yet, and if the first one failed her then she could try again so long as she didn’t get trapped on the wrong side of it. But by this time Liz had quite a good practical grasp of anomalies’ workings, and she could tell by looking at them and by the same strange sixth sense Helen had displayed once or twice when they were weakening or when they were strong, and even make a very woolly guess about how long they’d be open. She’d had a few close calls, but she’d never yet been wrong - and nearly only counts in horse-shoes and hand-grenades, as her Uncle Ralph was inordinately fond of saying, although what he had to do with either one of those items Liz did not propose to enquire.

 

            She found herself heading slightly up hill, a slow incline that was murder on the calf muscles and only levelled out some time mid-afternoon, just in time for Liz to hear a girl’s voice, screaming.

 

            Liz stopped dead and pinpointed the noise – somewhere a couple of hundred metres ahead of her, in thick scrub bush like that she’d emerged into, and there, just there, perhaps twenty metres off to the side of that, was the anomaly glittering. She did the mental maths – a girl’s voice, definitely a girl’s voice, Liz had heard lots of noises that could pass for human screams in the past few months but none of them had sobbed for their daddy, and there was an anomaly right there, bright and strong – and her heart leapt. She could go through, the ARC would be there, she could tell them where the kid was...

 

            Except: what if the anomaly went through to before the ARC was organised enough to have an anomaly detector? What if there was no ARC? Liz could smell blood on the wind and she had no doubt that other predators could too. Just because she hadn’t seen them yet didn’t mean they weren’t there, and Liz was well aware that she presented a less vulnerable and therefore less attractive target than a bleeding child. She knew the kid had little to no time, and if she was going to bring her back then she couldn’t afford to detour into the anomaly.

 

            Liz swore aloud, and sprinted forwards towards the screams.

 

           

            The little girl wasn’t actually as badly hurt as Liz had suspected; there was one long, shallow cut down her left arm, which she was favouring heavily, and that was giving out most of the blood. She was still going by the time Liz got there, thoroughly impressed with her lungpower, and her uninjured right arm was brandishing a thorny stick to reasonable effect, although she was starting to waver. She was also dressed in unmistakably modern clothes, a purple cotton dress and sparkly trainers, and Liz’s heart thumped in double-time so that it took her a very long time to register the presence of whatever the things were that had cut up the kid’s arm, and also the fact that they had noticed her.

 

            They didn’t look like any dinosaurs Helen had told Liz about, apart from maybe an especially funny-looking archaeopteryx; about the size of her dad’s colleague Abby’s pet coelosauravus, these had sharper teeth, bigger claws and more aggressive natures. They went straight for her eyes and throat, and Liz slashed at them with her knife, getting in one lucky blow before she grabbed the girl, pushed her face into her shoulder to protect it, ducked her own head and bolted for the anomaly. Creatures had been too scared to follow Liz into anomalies before, and she hoped the fear of the unknown would lead these creatures to back off. Or maybe they were just very territorial and defending a nest, and would cut out the slash-and-kill shit as soon as she and the kid got out of their way.

 

            She could feel the creatures tearing at her rucksack, and – lacking breath for swearwords – grunted as they opened up a matrix of sluggishly bleeding gashes along her left shoulder and neck, where the kid’s head was nestled, but the anomaly was here and – fuck, _flickering_?

 

            Liz flung herself forwards into a mad approximation of a forward roll, and hurtled straight through the anomaly, and onto the leaf litter of a forest floor. Lying on her back, winded, shoulder stinging, kid worryingly silent, heavy and wet with blood on her chest, and rucksack poking a hundred very uncomfortable holes in her back, Liz Lester heard the semi-audible whisper of a closing anomaly, and shut her eyes with relief.

 

            She opened them after a reluctant moment to see a very familiar face looking down at her, and if she had thought she was relieved before, it was as nothing to the electric thrill of joy that slid a delighted smile onto her face, put life into her stretched muscles and aching bones and got her halfway off the forest floor. “ _Jon_!”

 

            Lyle gave her a puzzled frown, and also the barrel of an M16 focussed neatly between her eyes.

 

            “Oh, fuck,” Liz said involuntarily, eyes crossing. “Not Jon?”

 

            Liz realised distantly that the reason the girl still draped over her chest was so quiet was because she was crying, silent heavy tears that were further besmirching the front of Liz’s lost cause of a shirt. Liz patted her absent-mindedly on the back, and made automatic soothing noises. At any other time she’d have been trying to coax the kid out of her tears, reminding her she was alive and safe and there was no call to cry, but one of the three people she trusted most in the world was pointing a gun at her, and words were pretty much a lost cause.

 

            In fact, Liz was really quite tempted to cry herself.


	19. Chapter 19

Simon Price had been Liz’s best friend since he was seven years old, and he had never known a crisis like this. He wasn’t naturally much of a leader, and normally he’d look to Liz for a firm idea of what to do next, but that was just the problem, wasn’t it? Liz was missing in action, and no-one seemed to know where she was. Simon had bombarded her with messages on Facebook, on her mobile and on her home phone. He’d asked Juliet, who had burst into tears. He’d even bitten the bullet and looked up Liz’s mum and younger brother, who, in Simon’s not-very-educated opinion, were crazy; Kathy quite liked Simon, and might possibly be quite helpful. She hadn’t been, not really. When he’d said he was looking for Liz, she’d said quite quietly that Liz wasn’t well, not well enough to see people, and had heavily implied that it had to do with some kind of mental break over Jamie dying.

 

One: that had been a year ago, and the anniversary was well past. Two: Simon had seen the resulting freak-out, and while it hadn’t been pretty, it hadn’t involved disappearing for weeks, either.

 

Nicky had been even less helpful, really. Simon had bumped into him on the way back to the Tube station, walking home with his guitar slung over his back, and had questioned him. Nicky looked tired and more rumpled than usual, but that could just be being a teenager; he’d rolled his blue eyes at Simon and snapped “I don’t bloody know, ask Lyle,” and had then stamped off.

 

This was either a valuable clue – why, after all, had Nicky not told him to ask Liz’s dad rather than her stepdad, who Nicky notoriously refused to acknowledge? – or Nicky being a total nuisance. Being Liz’s friend, and having seen a fair sample of Nicky’s most obnoxious behaviour as a result, Simon inclined to the latter.

 

Still. There’d been a funny look on Nicky’s face, a sort of, _go on, listen to me_ kind of look, and Nicky barely knew Simon. All Nicky knew was that Simon was Liz’s best friend, and Simon was prepared to go to some fairly odd lengths to try to find her. After all, Liz and her mum couldn’t stand each other, and only someone who was more than normally concerned would go looking for her there.

 

Simon got off his train and changed Tube lines. It was worth a try.

 

 

The evil concierge who worked at the foot of Liz’s building was still there, but normally ignored Simon; he was very surprised to hear her call out to him.

 

“Sorry?” he said, turning and staring at her.

 

“I’m not allowed to let anyone in without asking who they’re looking for and calling up now,” the concierge said. “Name?”

 

“Simon Price going to see James Lester in flat 42,” Simon said, astonished. “I’m looking for his daughter Liz, she’s a friend of mine and she’s not answering her phone. I’m concerned.”

 

The concierge called up. “James Lester isn’t there.”

 

“If Jon Lyle is, I’ll happily see him instead,” Simon said, folding his arms.

 

The concierge looked like she was thinking about it, and what she was thinking wasn’t in Simon’s favour.

 

“Right thanks so helpful of you,” Simon said, and bolted for the lift, nearly knocking over the Dowager Lady Fanshawe while he was at it. Still, although the concierge shouted after him, she didn’t stop him, and Simon reckoned he could make it into the flat before she called out whichever stupid security firm patrolled this place – and that Lyle wouldn’t let anyone chuck him out just like that. He might do it himself, but he wouldn’t let a randomer in a security t-shirt do it.

 

Feeling moderately optimistic that his grand plan was working, he hurried along to flat 42’s front door and raised a hand to knock, but it was opened before he could do so by someone Simon didn’t recognise, a tallish guy with dishwasher-blond hair, brown eyes, and so much in the way of shoulders Simon was frankly surprised he’d got through the door and into the flat.

 

“Simon Price, right?” the stranger said, with an amiable smile.

 

“... uh,” said Simon. “Yes? Excuse me, but who are you?”

 

“You can call me Ditzy,” the stranger said. “Jon’s gone for a slash but he said to let you in.”

 

“Okay, cool,” Simon said warily. “Do you work with Lyle or something?”

 

“Yeah, old mates. Jon said you were a friend of Liz’s so you’ll understand me when I say none of that family really needs to be alone right now.”

 

Simon had now had time to notice the sheer number of strange people lounging around Liz’s flat, watching the footie. “So you decided on a full-scale invasion? Wow, okay. And sorry, but I have to ask. _Ditzy_?”

 

 There was a general laugh. “I see why you like Liz so much,” one dim-looking man grinned from what looked like a spectacularly uncomfortable position on the floor. “You’re her type.”

 

“Her type is female,” Simon said patiently, being accustomed to this line of talk, “so no, really not. You know Liz?”

 

“We’ve all met her at least a few times,” Ditzy said. “Some of us have been caving with her. Right.”

 

“Left,” Simon muttered, unable to suppress the inner sass, and Ditzy gracefully ignored him, pointing out different people.

 

“From left to right – yes, funny, Finn – we have: Blade, Finn, Fiver, Dan, and Lyle’s around here somewhere, the sod. And you’re Simon.”

 

“Yup.” Simon waved vaguely at the collection of muscle, which came in various shapes, sizes, degrees of good looks and apparent intelligence, not to mention visible dangerousness. Simon sometimes felt that his chief use to Liz was as a measure of common sense, and every instinct he had was politely suggesting that he make his excuses and leave before the guy Ditzy (really – _Ditzy_? Who’d dared to call him that? And how the fuck had it managed to stick?) had called Blade skinned him alive. 

 

But he was here for Liz. And if their places had been changed, Liz would be here, kicking down doors and threatening people until they told him who –

 

Hang on a minute: where was Lyle?

 

Simon’s brain ran through several possibilities in a split second, and settled on the most humiliating. “You’re doing that really creepy thing where you tiptoe up behind me and tap me on the shoulder and go ‘boo!’ just to hear me shriek, aren’t you?” he said flatly, without taking his eyes off the TV. Spurs were losing badly. “It’s only funny when Liz does it.”

 

There was more general laughter. A certain amount of money indiscreetly changed hands.

 

“In my defence,” Lyle said, somewhere quite close behind his left ear, “it’s _really_ funny when Liz does it. And you’ve just lost me twenty quid.”

 

“World’s tiniest violin concert playing right here, right now,” Simon said, turning around and folding his arms. “Speaking of Liz. Seriously. She’s been gone two weeks. Where is she?”

 

The atmosphere dropped about ten degrees, and there was suddenly complete silence, except for the faint commentary on the football game. Simon curled his toes into his boots and held his ground.

 

“She’s not answering her phone. She’s not answering her Facebook messages. She’s missed a cinema trip and when I came round looking for her there was no-one here. I asked Juliet if she’d seen her last week, just, you know, casually, and Juliet started crying. I asked Nicky, who doesn’t talk to her for weeks on end. I tracked down her mum to ask where she was, and I know Kathy lives to make Liz’s life difficult, because I’m running out of options, you see?”

 

His back was itching, so many people were staring at it. He turned round and dispensed a general glare in the hope that it would amuse them enough to make them lay off and stop making him nervous. “Because I’ve been Liz’s best friend since we were seven, okay? Since I was a dickhead about Jamie and she punched me and knocked out one of my milk teeth, which is the kind of lesson nobody ever forgets, particularly Liz, who broke her thumb because she didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be in her fist. And now she’s missing, and Kathy seems to think she’s sick. But how sick is she, that Juliet isn’t with her? How sick is she, that she can’t answer her phone? Is she dying? Then why isn’t Kathy there?”

 

He turned back to face Lyle. “And why did Nicky, who’s a massive pain in the arse, by the way, and I resent the fact that I had to have a conversation with him to get this information, tell me I should talk to _you_?”   

 

There was more of the almost-total-silence, until Simon’s pulse was hammering in his ears and he was feeling like he ought to be cutting his losses and running, Spurs still three-nil down at half-time, Lyle’s expression no less guarded, the stillness no less unbroken, menace mounting in the air, and then someone farted.

 

“Somebody open a fucking window,” someone else muttered. “And then throw Finn out of it. That was a disgusting rupture in some quality dramatic tension, that was.”

 

“Simon here writes plays,” Lyle remarked. “Good ones. Did you have to think that one up in the lift?”

 

“No,” Simon said, pushing his hair out of his face. Definitely time for a trim, the way it was flopping about. “In the lift I was too busy thinking about whether you would let security throw me out or not. No, that was purely extempore, thank you, and it’s nice to be appreciated. By the way, since when does whatsername check who people’re going to visit?”

 

“That’s new. Or rather, it’s old, but she wasn’t doing her job very well. Get yourself a beer and sit down, Simon, and I’ll tell you what happened to Liz.”

 

It sounded significantly too good to be true, but Simon grabbed a beer from the not-very-secret store behind the hummus anyway, dumped his bag by the door, and went and sat down on the floor, quite close to the door, to the way out. He saw them notice and grin to themselves, and raised his eyebrows.

 

“What? It’s not like I don’t know you couldn’t catch me before I even got to my feet. It’s just Liz would kill me for being _egregiously_ stupid.”

 

“Can’t argue with that,” Lyle said easily. “Talking of Liz.”

 

Simon waited for a long moment.

 

“She was kidnapped,” Lyle continued, much more slowly, face now grim rather than just guarded. “Right out of Battersea Park, when she was on a run. She got whoever it was with her penknife, she fought back, but she didn’t have much of a chance – it was about six to one. We don’t know exactly where she is now. We have a reasonable idea and we’re looking, but.”

 

His voice didn’t trail off. It stopped dead, as if he had no more breath.

 

“It’s a big area,” Dan filled in, seamless and smooth as if Lyle wasn’t sitting there with his jaw clenched tight and his fist threatening to crush his beer can. Dan looked older than most of the others, and Simon guessed that he’d known them all for a very long time, to be talking over Lyle with so much authority. “We have an idea, but not much more. We found what looked like a campsite a single person had used, a dead fire, disturbed surface in a cave, a comb missing some teeth, and a matted plait someone had cut off, cleanly, with a knife. The colour’s right for Liz’s. It’s getting tested. We’ll see if it is.”

 

“Cut off her hair?” Simon repeated, and then said “No, of course – she would – if she thought she was wasting her time trying to brush it. But _kidnapped_? Why? I mean, was there a ransom or anything?”

 

“No ransom,” Lyle said, with a swift shake of his head. “The woman who’s done it is known to the Met, and Interpol, and a bunch of shadier people sensible citizens don’t want to be known to. She doesn’t want money, she wants her – investment. The person she took. Liz. It’s connected to James’ work.”

 

“Revenge?” Simon said, feeling vaguely dizzy. “Hang on. You said she was kidnapped, but then you said the campsite was just a one-person thing. How-?”

 

“We think she got free.” Lyle smiled, and it wasn’t very nice. “Think, Simon. If you were a kidnapper, and you just took Liz, just like that, right out of her home, and you kept her somewhere inhospitable and nasty, kept her away from her friends, her family, her girlfriend... exactly how tractable would your captive be?”

 

Simon blinked. “Tractable like a rabid polar bear is tractable. Wow. Someone fucked up.”

 

Lyle grinned. “You know, I think they did. We just need to find Liz now. She’s not far. We can’t have been more than a few hours off.”

 

Simon was rarely extraordinarily perceptive, but the suppressed frustration in the last sentence, combined with the hope of the others, caught his ear. “Are you okay?”

 

“That’s a stupid question, Simon Price.”

 

“Yeah. And I’m not stupid.” Simon let his eyes drift to the TV. “So. Which poor bugger is supporting Spurs? And also, why? They’ve been playing for shit this season.”


	20. Chapter 20

Jon Lyle, faced with a possible hostile, a closing anomaly with a kid on the other side, and bloodied civilians all at once, decided to start from the basics. “Who the fuck are you?”

 

            “My name is Liz Lester,” said the woman collapsed on the floor with wide eyes and a kid in her arms who looked the right age to be the missing little girl. “I’m... lost. Hey, where is everyone? This kid is bleeding out all over my lap. Ditzy, you should be all over this!”

 

            Ditzy, standing several feet away and clearly shocked by the fact this stranger knew his name, twitched towards his medical kit. Lyle also twitched, but chiefly out of surprise, and saw the stranger’s eyes follow the gun barrel as it moved. She flung a hand out, and a knife skittered in the autumn leaves.

 

            “That is the sum total of my weaponry.” The woman who called herself Liz was speaking slowly and deliberately; Lyle looked closer at her, and guessed that she was only twenty or so, although it was hard to tell under the dirt. Her words and tone, combined with the sharpness of brown eyes staring out from a grimy, tanned face and lank, crudely cut dark hair were giving Lyle serious misgivings about the significance of her surname, but he was sure he’d never met a daughter or a niece of James’s, and was therefore at a loss. “Search me if you like, but help the kid. I don’t know where or when I am, but the Jon Lyle I know is not much for letting kids bleed out while help is standing _right the fuck there_.”

 

            “Ditzy,” Lyle said harshly, and Ditzy leapt forward to take the recently returned girl (Jessica Mason aged six and a half, parents newcomers to the Forest of Dean area, which explained more than it didn’t) only to run into a problem when Jessica clung to Liz. To do her credit, Liz looked moderately horrified.

 

            “Hey, hey, that’s enough. Come on. Ditzy wants to help you, and I’m kind of useless.” Liz picked fruitlessly at Jessica’s hold on her ruined shirt.

 

            “Hold her,” Ditzy ordered Liz, flipping open his medical kit, apparently prepared to treat Jessica right there and then. Liz looked helplessly up at Lyle and shrugged, which brought a flash of pain to her thin face.

 

            Ditzy didn’t miss it. “Where are you hurt?”

 

            “There are, like, cuts on my shoulder. I don’t know how bad they are, but – they kind of hurt, you know? And I can smell the blood. They’ll be okay until you’re done with... uh...”

 

            The little girl sobbed her name, adding the rider that it hurt lots and lots and screwing her face into the side of Liz’s neck.

 

            “... Jessica. I know, okay, sweetie? I know it hurts. Ditzy will fix it. Ditzy sees worse than you every day of the week and he fixes nearly all of them.” Liz stroked the kid’s back clumsily. Her hands were bloody and dirty, and Lyle could see her trying to avoid using one of them, presumably the one attached to the injured shoulder.

 

            Lyle eased his grip on his rifle, and spared several moments to wonder how Liz knew so much about them, and also why the name Liz Lester was setting off alarm bells in his head; it wasn’t as if she closely resembled Lester, although she did, somehow, look worryingly familiar...

Ditzy ordered Kermit to call an ambulance for Jessica, and Lyle snapped himself out of it and nodded to Blade to pick up Liz’s knife. She evidently caught the movement, because she shrugged painfully out of the straps of her rucksack and shifted to sit cross-legged, Jessica still across her lap.

 

            “Search my bag while you’re at it, if you like.”

 

            “You’re very obliging,” Lyle jibed, unable to resist. Blade, so much more impassive, just picked up and carried the rucksack out of the way at the same time as he picked up the knife – bloodied, Lyle noticed – and disappeared it somewhere Lyle preferred not to think about. The rucksack was battered and heavily cut about, with great rips in the material that suggested that whatever had attacked Jessica had gone after Liz even more viciously.

 

            Liz gave him a distressingly familiar flat look. “I have no reason to be otherwise.”

 

            “But you could have a lot of reasons for being deliberately well-behaved.”

 

            Liz visibly suppressed an eye-roll. “Like what?” She shifted slightly to better accommodate Ditzy and Jessica. “I’m on my own. I have one objective, and it’s getting home. Like I told you. I’m really _lost_.” Her voice broke on the last word, and Lyle mentally revised his estimate of her age down a few years, but her eyes remained steady.

 

            Ditzy lifted Jessica out of her lap very gently, wrapped her in a shock blanket, and set her down on a slightly less bloody patch of real estate. “Your turn, miss.”

 

            Liz let out a sigh, and twisted round. Lyle didn’t give any sign of shock at the injuries revealed, but he stared: her left shoulder was a mess of sodden, torn black cotton and gleaming red flesh. It probably wasn’t as bad as it looked, but he was still genuinely impressed that a clearly ill-fed and travel-worn young woman had made it through a closing anomaly at a dead run, carrying a sturdy small child, with something toothy shredding her shoulder.

 

            “I’m going to have to cut this off you,” Ditzy warned, retrieving a pair of clothing shears from the first aid kit (although why he didn’t just use a knife Lyle didn’t know).

 

            “The shirt? I knew it was a goner.”

 

            Accordingly, Ditzy cut the bits of the shirt he could get away from the skin cleanly, and peeled back those that were associated with the wound. Liz flinched, but didn’t complain.

 

            Lyle heard sirens in the distance and footsteps much closer, so half-turned to reveal Miss Brown approaching at speed and looking harried.   

 

            “Where’s the anomaly?” she demanded, and Lyle could see by the pallor of her face that she’d come to the obvious conclusion. “Oh God, no. Lieutenant-”

 

            “We’ve got her,” Lyle said, realising that he was obscuring Miss Brown’s view of Jessica Mason and moving. “And somebody else.”

 

            “Jenny?” Liz said in tones of resignation, but she was facing entirely the wrong way to see Miss Brown’s now confused and offended face. “Jenny Lewis? That you?”

 

            Miss Brown frowned at her. “No, I’m not ‘Jenny’. Who are you?”

 

            Liz twisted, causing Ditzy to rain a few of his milder curses down on her head, and frowned just as thunderously at Miss Brown. “Sorry? You look and sound just like her. Except you’re a bit more subtle with the make-up and the hair-dye.”

 

            Miss Brown glowered. “I’m sorry, didn’t you hear me the first time? Who. Are. You?”

 

            “Liz Lester,” Liz said crossly. “Who are you?”

 

            Miss Brown didn’t seem to have heard her. She was gaping, soft brown eyes blown wide with total horror. “You’re lying. Liz Lester is _dead_.”

 

            Ditzy faltered, clean cotton swabs falling to the forest floor, and Lyle almost dropped his gun. Of course he knew the name Liz Lester: this bedraggled young woman, if you cleaned off layers of dirt, tan and blood and fed her for a few months, would be a perfect match for the girl who laughed from the picture on James’s desk at home, who crept into his every sketch. Except that Lyle had visited her grave, he’d read unfathomable pain and grief in James’ eyes, he’d listened to Jamie Burke-Lester describing in a perfectly steady and matter-of-fact voice the sound his sister’s body had made three years ago as it hit the tarmac, brakes screaming too late, far too late.

 

            “What?” the girl on the ground said, sounding thoroughly confused and not a little taken aback. “No. Seriously, no. How long have I been missing? I’m sure I can explain – ow, look, Ditzy, your freezing fingers are bad enough, but do you have to stick them right into the cuts?”

 

            “You haven’t been missing,” Miss Brown said. “You’ve been dead three years.”

 

            Liz blinked at her, and her shoulders hunched defensively, making Ditzy tell her off again, brusquer this time. “No. I’ve come close a few times, but I’m definitely alive, and I’m definitely still Liz, and I’m definitely sane. And believe me, all three of those things are cause for celebration.”

 

            “Prove it.” Lyle forced the words out. God, this would kill James when he found out. He’d loved his daughter so much...

 

            Liz stared hopelessly at him. “How? I’ve been behind the anomalies at least three months. I had stuff with my name on it when I was – taken, but it got lost. I was trying to break Helen Cutter’s face and kick her minions in the balls, okay, retaining my iPod was not a high priority. My trainers had my name in them, but a little raptory thing ran off with one this morning and I threw the other away. I didn’t...” Her face twisted unhappily. “I’m trying to get home. This clearly isn’t home, or you’d know me, all of you. Except maybe you, Miss Brown. Do you have a twin or something? Anyway. Give me back my stuff and find me an anomaly, and I’ll – I’ll go, okay, I won’t be your problem any more. Just let me go home.”  


            Miss Brown seized on the only bit of this speech that made any sense to anyone present. “Helen _Cutter_?”

 

            “Yup,” Liz said gloomily. Lyle could hear a faint note of hysteria in her voice. “She said she wanted company. I don’t know what made her think kidnapping was a good recruiting tool.”

 

            At this opportune moment, the paramedics arrived, walking into the silence of a lot of stunned people. Lyle looked at Miss Brown and found her looking back at him; for once they were in perfect accord, which given their professional history of mutual failure to see eye to eye was impressive, and which would make it a lot easier to bully the paramedics into not taking Liz to hospital.

 

            “We’re bringing you in,” Lyle said.

 

            “Lester needs to know about this,” Miss Brown agreed.

 

            Liz, composure fully recovered, gave them a dubious look from under her hideous fringe. “My dad? I mean, fine. But if he thinks I’ve been dead for years, you’d probably better give him a stiff drink before you tell him otherwise.”

 

***

 

            Liz wondered whether she should be worried or relieved by how easily this strange mirror image of the anomaly project managed to get her away from the paramedics’ tender ministrations. She had already decided to play along, knowing that she had little real choice, so she sat still, comforted Jessica and smiled through the stinging pain at her shoulder as she delivered cheerful assurances that she knew the people who were taking her away, and was perfectly safe and comfortable with them. Ditzy – Liz was having trouble disassociating him from the Ditzy she knew, because unlike Lyle or the strange Miss Brown he was behaving exactly as normal – told the paramedics he’d send her in to be checked on later, and Miss Brown played an odd sort of quietly imperious part Liz didn’t really know how to manage. She was much more at home with ballsier, brasher Jenny, and suspected that Jenny would have been quicker to trust her than Miss Brown was going to be. It probably didn’t help that Liz had originally called her by the wrong name.

 

            The paramedics went away with Jessica but not Liz, casting curious and worried looks over at Liz; Liz heard one of them remonstrating quietly with Ditzy, _we know what you lot are like but she’s just a kid_ , and hid a snigger. Of course, there were several factors that spoiled her show of willingness to go along with whatever Miss Brown said, and she wouldn’t be surprised if this incident haunted the anomaly project’s reputation for some time. Seeing herself through others’ eyes, or at least Ditzy’s questions and Miss Brown’s poorly hidden horror and incredulity, she knew that she was dirty, ill-fed, injured, unkempt, and probably smelly, too. Probably the only thing that had stopped the paramedics calling the police on the project and carrying her off whatever Miss Brown said was the fact that she didn’t really look her age. All the people she’d met behind the anomalies had guessed her age wrong, pushing it up a couple of years either because her unexpected skinniness aged her or because they were operating on a wishful-thinking basis, and assuming that no child would have gone through the things Liz had.

 

            Liz climbed into one of the Jeeps, informed Kermit a) that he might think he was impassive but he had another think coming and b) that she would like to see him take a bath in a stream full of nasty little dinosaurs and fish with giant teeth, and cranked open a window, grinning at the stunned look on Kermit’s face. Miss Brown thanked her politely for the courtesy, a faint hint of amusement in her voice, and asked her not to try tumbling out of the window to freedom.

 

            “What would be the point?” Liz said reasonably, hearing the joke in Miss Brown’s words as Lyle drove (very sedately for him) away from the anomaly site. “I don’t know where I am.”

 

            Miss Brown twisted round and gave her a surprised look. “Really? Helen always seems to know exactly where she is. To our cost.”

 

            Liz wrinkled her nose. “She has gadgets and ten years of experience. I have an Ordnance Survey map and some truly epic optimism. I know I’m somewhere south of Bristol, but it’s really hard to be specific.”

 

            “You’re in the Forest of Dean,” Miss Brown said patiently. “We’re heading for the Mitchells’ hotel, which is our base here.”

 

            Liz frowned. Impractical, surely? And really inconvenient for the hotel owners? She framed these queries in the politest way possible. “Why a hotel?”

 

            “Because,” Miss Brown said, a pained look passing across her face in the manner of someone who has just been forced to acknowledge several very unpleasant memories.

 

            Liz could take a hint, and she could also see a faint hint of Lyle’s smirk (which was not, she noted with scientific interest and a certain amount of distress, exactly the same as Jon’s - unless she’d forgotten what her stepdad’s expressions looked like, a possibility she was not prepared to contemplate). She scooted carefully back in her seat so as not to jog her injured shoulder, and looked out of the window with interest, automatically filing away notes on turnings and potential routes back. Knowing that Miss Brown was watching her in the rear-view mirror, she did her best to project unconcerned nonchalance, hands still and innocent in her lap, eyes drifting over local landmarks and very carefully not wandering back into the car to catch Miss Brown’s eye.

 

            Liz quite liked the look of the hotel they now drove up to; it looked relatively quiet, and as if it was mostly there to cater for young families and outdoorsy people, although the ‘Closed’ sign was both out of place and a complete lie. The slightly muddy black Jeeps in the car park attested to that.

                                                    

            Tactfully, she waited for Kermit to have climbed out and be able to cover her as she got out of the car, although the alternate Lyle was already there. He gave her a faintly suspicious stare, and she returned an eye-roll.

 

            “This is all very routine,” Miss Brown said, giving Lyle a distinctively warning look and making Liz blink. She hadn’t expected to make an ally of Miss Brown, at least, not so early on.

 

            “That’s good?” she said, somewhat at a loss, and Miss Brown nodded firmly and marched into the hotel.

 

            Lyle’s suspicious stare did not go away. Liz mentally accounted for his feeling protective towards this alternate version of her father, and graciously let it slide. It was easier than usual to do that, and she wasn’t sure if that was because she was being mature, or because this alternate universe of her own world still felt really unreal. She felt like the outsider she was, even among these people, other versions of whom were closer to her than most members of her family. Their version of her was dead, and Liz was free to completely fail to identify with her. She felt as if this were all some weird dream, from which she would wake soon, but not too soon. She was sure she was safe here, and she knew thinking that way was a mistake.


	21. Chapter 21

            The inside of the hotel was relatively quiet, although it livened up a bit when people saw her – probably because it was a shock to see anyone not Helen Cutter who’d clearly been travelling through an anomaly. Looking round as much as she could, Liz saw Abby Maitland, Connor Temple, and two men she didn’t recognise – one bulky and clearly military with sandy blond hair, the other tall, rangy and darkly good-looking. Liz immediately classified the latter as ‘trouble’, on the grounds that no-one healthy and well-adjusted wore an angst-ridden expression like that as a matter of course. All of them seemed surprised to see her.

 

            Liz came to a halt in the middle of the bar, and patiently waited for someone to indicate what happened next. Nobody appeared particularly interested in talking to her, so she just let her mind drift, explored her ripped shoulder with careful fingers, and idly tried to work out the personal relationships playing out around her. Miss Brown and the blond soldier clearly had something going on, and Abby, Connor and the tall dark man they called Stephen obviously functioned as a unit of some kind, one confident enough to tag-team Lyle with questions. Liz yawned, cursed the nightmares that had broken her sleep the previous night, and wondered if Kermit would make her stand up if she sat down. She half-turned, informed him of her intentions, and collapsed to sit cross-legged on the floor with a loud thump which attracted Lyle’s attention.

 

            He rounded on her. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

 

            Liz rested her forehead on the hand attached to her good arm and eyed him. She’d never seen Lyle in full laying-waste-to-surroundings-with-indiscriminate-wrath mode, but she thought he was going there now; she couldn’t seem to make herself care very much, which she suspected was down to exhaustion rather than innate badassery. “Sitting down.”

 

            “Did I fucking say you could _move_?”

 

            Liz pushed lank, greasy hair off her face, in order to take a break from meeting his eyes. “No. And I don’t care. I’m filthy, I’ve lost too much blood, I’m hungry, and I’m tired. I might have stayed on my feet if you were my CO or my stepdad, but you’re neither, so fuck you, I’m not hanging around waiting for you to graciously _let_ me do shit.”

 

            There was an ominous silence, and the chill coming off Lyle dropped the ambient temperature a few degrees; Liz paused to review the last few sentences in her mind, and concluded that she was doomed, and that it was largely her fault. Lyle would be perfectly within his rights to paste her into the floor, after that speech. Her stepfather would already have done it. Liz let her head droop and her eyes fall shut, and waited for an onslaught that never came. Instead, someone with a steady, authoritative voice said “Lyle,” and Liz heard heavy footsteps retreating. She opened her eyes and looked up in an effort to solve the mystery, and crossed her eyes trying to focus on the well-kept hand held out to her. She took it, and forced herself off the ground with the leverage it gave her, wobbling desperately when she reached her feet and relying on Miss Brown to a disgraceful degree.

 

            “Come on,” Miss Brown said quite gently. “You need a bath and about a week of sleep. Don’t bother, Kermit,” she added more sharply. “If I can’t deal with her in this state it says more about my weakness than her viciousness. Get me Ditzy and tell him to bring clingfilm.”

 

            Liz’s fuddled mind tried to make sense of what was going on as Miss Brown drew her up some stairs and into what Liz vaguely understood to be a hotel bedroom. Liz sat down in the chair Miss Brown pushed her into, and took off her boots, socks and wrecked shirt with little hesitation: the latter garment had been practically shredded at the shoulder anyway, and was hanging off her. Removing it and sitting there in just a black sports bra represented a step forward as far as decency was concerned.

 

            Miss Brown gave a sharp intake of breath.

 

            Liz just blinked at her. “What?” She made an abortive and rather feeble move for her shirt. “C’n put it back on again, if y’like.” Her voice was slurred and drifting: listening to herself, she thought she sounded drunk.

 

            Miss Brown shook her head, faint horror in her eyes. “That’s all right.”

 

            “Y’don’t squeak like that if you’re all right,” Liz objected.

 

            “Firstly, I did not squeak, and secondly, if either of us is all right it’s certainly me. I can count your ribs! And what is that on your waist?”

 

            Liz looked down at herself, and realised that Miss Brown was talking about her scar. “’S a scar. Got it in the...” Her brow wrinkled. “Plasticine? Can’t be right. Told Helen it was stupid to go to a human time period. She said... it would be fine.” Liz scowled. “Lying bitch. Which of us got shot, again?”

 

            Miss Brown looked faintly pole-axed, but smiled and made an agreeing noise anyway. Liz couldn’t help noticing, however, that she looked pretty grateful when Ditzy entered the room, medical kit and incongruous roll of clingfilm in hand.

 

            “What _now_?” Liz moaned, a faint note of hysteria in her voice.

 

            Miss Brown put a hand on her unwounded shoulder. “We need to cover your injuries so you can take a bath.”

 

            Liz muttered assent and tolerated this operation, though she was rather tense, and recovered enough mulishness and lucidity to refuse sleeping pills. Miss Brown and Ditzy both tried to persuade her out of this, but Liz wouldn’t be moved, and finally ended the argument by saying, with more urgency than she had previously been able to summon up, that she needed to be able to wake up. Miss Brown cast Ditzy a disconcerted look, and they both gave up on making her knock herself out with tablets, which Liz considered a relief.

 

            The next half an hour was a blur, but Liz vaguely realised that Miss Brown was washing her hair over the bathtub for her, and managed to thank her and throw her out in time to undress painfully slowly and wash. She felt creaky, numb and stupid, and almost worked herself into tears when she got out of the bath, dried off and was unable to find a spare toothbrush, too tired to realise for several long minutes that if she just opened the bathroom cupboard she would find one. This problematic and long overdue task accomplished, Liz examined herself in the mirror and found that she was several shades cleaner, much more fragrant, and significantly more relaxed – but not so relaxed that she didn’t jump with shock when someone knocked on the door.

 

            “Liz?” Miss Brown said through the door. “I have some things for you here. I’ll leave them on the bed. I have to go downstairs now. If I were you, I’d get some sleep – ah, you should know there’s a guard on the door. His name’s Blade. Tell him if you need anything.” There was a small, uncertain pause. “He’s not as bad as he looks.”

 

            Liz couldn’t help the giggle she let out. “It’s okay, Miss Brown. I know Blade. Thanks.”

 

            Miss Brown relaxed audibly. “You’re welcome, Liz.”

 

            Liz waited till she’d gone, then slipped out of the bathroom and into the rather too large knickers and t-shirt Miss Brown had left her. She didn’t bother going outside to check if it really was Blade on watch, but climbed onto the bed and faceplanted into the pillows. The bed was comfortable, the sheets clean, the duvet warm.

 

            Liz silently thanked Miss Brown, shut her eyes and was gone.

 

***

  

            Claudia closed the door gently, and found herself looking directly at Blade, who was looking back at her, and also methodically cleaning a knife. She paused, decided that Liz would not yet have made it out of the bathroom and said firmly to him: “Don’t hurt her unless you absolutely have to.”

 

            Blade’s face didn’t alter in the slightest – not that she’d expected to. It was like talking to an unusually lethal brick wall, and whatever Tom said about Blade’s redeeming qualities, Claudia strongly suspected that all of them could be found at the business end of a knife. “I won’t, ma’am.”

 

            Claudia thought she needed to say something else, so as to render Blade’s definition of ‘need to hurt’ as narrow as possible, and she had noticed that the brighter kids they ran across liked Blade and that Blade was quite good with them, in a sort of ‘that’s sharp, if you don’t cut yourself on it I’ll show you how to throw it’ kind of way. “She’s not much more than a child, you know.”

 

            “I can see that, ma’am.”

 

            “Even if Lieutenant Lyle can’t?”

 

            “Especially if Lieutenant Lyle can’t.”

 

            Claudia made the executive decision to consider that one downstairs, with dignity and over a stiff gin and tonic, and duly went down the stairs to the bar. Lieutenant Lyle was not present. Claudia was pleased to see that; she might have been moved to say something pointed to him. The adult hostile Lyle had bellowed at bore no resemblance to the thin, scarred teenager whose hair Claudia had washed, and Lyle ought to have recognised that – although mouthy – she was no particular threat.

 

            Tom, however, _was_ there, and because he was clearly making a spirited bid for Boyfriend of the Year, he had a whisky and the aforementioned stiff gin and tonic in front of him. “Claudia.”

 

            Claudia caught the slight curve of his lips, and smiled back at him. “Tom. Is that for me? _Bless_ you.” She sat down on the stool next to him and sipped at the gin and tonic.

 

            “How’s the patient?” Tom said rather dryly.

 

            “Out of it,” Claudia said truthfully. “Constantly threatening to fall asleep. Significantly less disreputable-looking clean, although I’m sure she cut her hair with a knife. I left her something to wear and told her to get some sleep.” She hesitated.

 

            Tom waited patiently for her to spit out whatever it was.

 

            “She’s scarred, burnt brown, covered in insect bites, bruises and random scratches, and _much_ too thin. She needs several good meals and a lot of sleep.” Claudia stared down into the delicately fizzing depths of her glass. “She wouldn’t take sleeping pills - you could see the idea panicking her. She told me and Ditzy that she needed to be able to wake up.”

 

            Tom finished his whisky. “So not all the scars are physical?”

 

            “I should think most of them aren’t.” Claudia fidgeted with her glass. “The main one I saw is freshly healed – it’s a rip on her side, rather ragged, still pink, clearly not stitched. She blamed it on an interesting combination of Helen and the... the ‘Plasticine’?”

 

            “Pleistocene,” Tom guessed, and she gave him a startled look. “I did pay attention in some of Cutter’s lectures.”  


            They both laughed, but it was abruptly cut off, and the conversation drifted like loose mooring rope for a few minutes, until Claudia gathered up the ends of it again. “She said she’d told Helen they should stay out of human time periods, and she called Helen a ‘lying bitch’.”

 

            “Accurate.”

 

            “Well, yes. Anyway, I deduce from that firstly that Liz was not in control of where she was going, and secondly that she doesn’t like Helen.”

 

            “That’s in her favour,” Tom observed seriously.

 

            Claudia downed the last of her gin and tonic and slammed it down on the bar with more vigour than she’d meant to. “I don’t care what is or is not in her favour. I am _not_ going to let James dump her in some oubliette for the rest of her life because he can’t stand the sight of her!”

 

            Tom caught her eyes with his blue ones. “Can you stop him?”

 

            Claudia set her jaw. “Yes.”

 

            Tom nodded, and went round the counter of the bar to pour himself another whisky, and to get her a glass of water to drown the gin and tonic with.

 

            Claudia collected herself. “Did you find anything interesting in her rucksack?”

 

            Tom lifted his eyebrows. “It depends how you define interesting.”

 

            “Tom!”

 

            Tom relented. “We found almost nothing personal – it was all survival kit. She’s well-equipped and it’s all seen hard use. There were two things that weren’t completely practical: a bracelet and some kind of little grey square thing. It had words and a picture on the back – ‘The Spine, Cardiff’ and a skyscraper that looks like nothing I’ve ever seen, except maybe in the posher bits of Abu Dhabi. When Temple had a poke at it, it turned into some kind of 3D shimmering image of her, on a balcony, looking out to sea.”

 

            Claudia blinked.

 

            “Temple keeps jabbing at it, and he and Hart are trying to out-quote each other on Star Wars. ‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope’, and that kind of thing.” Tom took a gulp of his whisky. “For my money, she’s been to the future. That hologram thing is tourist tat, but it’s futuristic enough to be off Star Trek. There’s no skyscraper in Cardiff called the Spine. And the bracelet is printed with words – CARDIFF 2260.”

 

            Claudia stared at Tom, trying to wrap her mind around this. “The future,” she said hollowly.

 

            Tom shrugged. “Is it more unlikely than saying she’s been to the past?”

 

            “True, but...” Claudia stared at the polished wood of the counter. “How long ago would that, er, picture have been taken?”

 

            “Probably several months,” Tom said. “She looks cleaner, younger and not so thin. Happier, too. She raised an actual smile for the camera. Why do you ask?”

 

            “I was wondering how long she spent with Helen, and if she was happy.”

 

            Tom looked impassive. “Kermit told me she said Helen had kidnapped her. Lyle says there’s no evidence she wasn’t co-operating with Helen.”

 

            “Kermit is more likely to be neutral about this than Lyle is,” Claudia said, feeling protective on behalf of the girl sleeping upstairs, and wondering if Tom was going to take his friend’s side.

 

            Tom nodded rather grimly. “You’re right. Lyle doesn’t like her.” He tapped his fingers on the bar, and then suddenly turned to her with a smile that was oddly soft, considering their topic of conversation, and leaned in and kissed her, tilting her chin up to his with two fingers. Claudia was confused for a moment, and then she heard the words he murmured mere millimetres from her own lips. “He’s afraid of her.”

 

            “Why?” she breathed, equally quietly, and stepped a little closer to him, putting a small, silly smile onto her face and resting one hand lightly on his hip.

 

            Tom’s fingers slid into her loose hair and cupped the base of her skull. “Worried about Lester’s reaction, and Jamie’s. Jon treats that boy like his own son, and he loves Lester, Claudia. He’s just not prepared to admit it. And this will hurt both of them, and by extension it’ll hurt him.”

 

            Claudia rested her head against his shoulder, and thought. She had, in fact, seen Lyle with Lester and Lester’s older son, a charming, artistic, oddly reckless boy, and she agreed with Tom’s assessment. “I see.”

 

            “There’s more.” Tom bent his head to hers. “Liz recognised Lyle. Kermit said that until Lyle pointed a gun at her, she looked thrilled to see him. She called him by his first name. And when he didn’t respond, she assumed she had the wrong person, not that Jon didn’t know her. Temple’s been talking about alternate timelines: what if Liz is the real Liz, and she comes from another timeline?”

 

            _Another timeline_. Claudia leaned back, and looked Tom in the eye. She tried not to think too hard about the events of that day in 2006 when Nick hadn’t come back through the Permian anomaly, and when Tom had – with no memory of her. She’d lost her burgeoning relationship with Nick and her longstanding friendship with Tom in one blow, and she’d had to start from the beginning and it had been painful. “She didn’t know who I was, but she recognised my voice – she just gave it someone else’s name. She called me Jenny Lewis and said I looked like her.”

 

            “I never knew a Jenny Lewis,” Tom said quietly, stroking her hair back off her face.

 

            Claudia took a deep breath. “Are we saying what I think we’re saying?”

 

            A spark of amusement lit up Tom’s serious blue eyes. “Since you won’t say, I don’t know.” He kissed her forehead. “We’ll know more when Lester gets here and Liz wakes up. She seems not to mind talking.”

 

            “And we won’t let James disappear her,” Claudia said firmly, stepping back and taking a gulp of her water. She felt light-headed; the alcohol was not the culprit.

 

            “No,” Tom agreed, and darted forward to kiss her again. “But I can tell you this much, Claudia, even without interrogating runaways with lousy haircuts who pick fights with my men _. I love you._ And even if there _was_ an alternate timeline, even if that explains everything, then I wouldn’t go back.”

 

             Something tightly wound in Claudia loosened, and she relaxed. “For once, I believe you.”


	22. Chapter 22

            Liz did not wake until the next morning. Drifting just below the surface of sleep, she heard unfamiliar footsteps and was instantly alert and worried, which was fair enough, considering she was only wearing a pair of knickers and a shirt, both of which were too big, and had no weapons. As she listened, she realised what she was hearing was a very stifled argument, between Miss Brown, a couple of individuals she didn’t know, and someone whose voice was so familiar it was actively painful. Liz buried her face in her pillow, and told herself that the man she could hear outside wasn’t really her father, only a sort of mirror image of him, nothing to get upset about.

 

            She drew a deep breath and sat up, ignoring the twinge of pain from her shoulder. “If it helps sort out your argument,” she said as clearly as she could with a dry throat, “I’m awake.”

 

            There was a brief silence, and James Lester’s footsteps retreated. Miss Brown knocked on the door.

 

            Liz rolled her eyes. “Come in.”

 

            Miss Brown pushed the door open and came in. She was carrying a set of clothes – jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt and socks, none of which were Liz’s. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

 

            “Yes, thanks,” Liz said politely. “Was that... um, the guy who isn’t my dad, but in my timeline, he is?”

 

            “It was,” Miss Brown confirmed, with a look on her face that said she’d had to chase Liz’s meaning through that sentence and hadn’t enjoyed it. “He wanted to know when you would be awake. I respectfully suggested that he leave you to sleep. He didn’t see you earlier, or to be honest I don’t think waking you would ever have come into question.”

 

            “That bad?” Liz said, trying to push her messy fringe out of her face. She had no idea how Simon managed, really. She was going to have to get it cut at the first opportunity.

 

            “Worse,” Miss Brown said, and dropped the clothes on the foot of the bed. “These belong to one of the Mitchells’ children – Mary brought them out for you, because we couldn’t find anything fit for the weather in your rucksack. Breakfast is in half an hour.”

 

            “Thanks,” Liz said.

 

            Miss Brown smiled at her. “You’re welcome.”

 

            Liz tried a smile in return; it must have worked because Miss Brown’s smile widened and she looked significantly more cheerful as she went out. Liz herself climbed out of bed, feeling no stiffer and creakier than usual but with an aching shoulder, and took another quick bath. She had a feeling she’d missed bits of ingrained dirt last night, and she definitely hadn’t bothered to shave her legs or anything. She noticed, while she was in the bathroom, that there were two sets of things in there – two lots of shampoo, two lots of shower-gel, two toothbrushes – and realised, with a pang of guilt, that she’d evicted people from their room. Given the way Miss Brown was behaving, it was probably her room and that of the blond soldier whose name she hadn’t caught. Liz took care to leave everything as she found it, and picked the tangles of snapped hair out of the comb she borrowed, washed out the tub and made the bed when she was sure she was properly clean.

 

            She dressed in the clothes Miss Brown had left her, which were the right size for a change, and which included her own underwear, freshly washed; it felt odd to wear clean clothes and to be clean herself, and Liz really thought she almost looked respectable, except for the hair. But there wasn’t a lot she could do about the hair.

 

            Liz stuck her head round the door and found someone she recognised, after a few seconds’ careful thought, as Adey. “Hi? Miss Brown said there was breakfast. Can I go down?”

 

            “Yeah, sure,” Adey said, with an easygoing smile, and let her out of her room and down the stairs, but Liz noticed both that he was armed and that he followed her downstairs rather than the other way round. She shrugged internally; no good expecting them to trust her at this point.

 

            She was ten minutes earlier than Miss Brown had said, but no-one looked particularly surprised to see her, possibly because the novelty had started to wear off and turn into nuisance, possibly because it was a quarter to eight and they were mostly still asleep. She could see James Lester and Lyle at the end of one table, not looking at her, and she carefully didn’t look at him; when Miss Brown waved at her, she managed another smile and slipped into the space she was offered. Breakfast was generous; Liz knew she would probably be ill if she had too large or too rich a meal, and she’d been fed up with plain meat for months, so got herself a cup of coffee, a small bowl of fruit and a modest portion of heavily sugared porridge, then politely asked Abby to pass the honey.

 

            Connor Temple did it instead, eyes bright with excitement. “Have you seen a G-rex?”

           

            Abby put her face in her hands, Stephen sniggered into his coffee, and Miss Brown sighed. Startled, Liz fumbled the honey, and caught it in her other hand, almost sending Miss Brown’s orange juice flying. “What’s a G-rex? I don’t know the, like, names and stuff.”

 

            “It’s...” Connor’s face contorted as he tried to think of a way to explain G-rexes to a wretched laywoman like herself. “Like a T. rex, but bigger.”

 

            Liz thought. “Maybe?” she offered weakly after a minute. “I mean, I saw some things like T. rexes, but I was kind of running away from them at the time, so. You know. Also, when they start getting really big you stop noticing relative size and start noticing ‘fucking big thing that wants to eat me’. Um. Sorry, Miss Brown.”

 

            “That’s all right, I’m used to bad language,” Miss Brown said graciously, and gave Connor the evil eye. He looked vaguely deflated. “Connor, save the questions for later.”

 

Liz took a tentative sip of coffee and involuntarily shut her eyes and smiled softly with real enjoyment. It was good coffee, from a cafetière in the centre of the table which she didn’t think had seen a spoonful of instant coffee in its life, and she’d missed proper coffee. Dr Donne had forbidden her from touching any in 2036, and Eaglescroft’s coffee was just _weird_ , for some reason.

 

Miss Brown laughed at her. “Caffeine addict?”

 

“Mm,” Liz said happily, wallowed in the glow of a proper caffeine hit for a few minutes, and then set out to make inroads into her breakfast. She finished at about the same time as the others, and got a grin and a comment that she must have been hungry from Stephen, which she answered with a half-shrug. It was food. She hadn’t had to hunt or scavenge it and it hadn’t been cooked over a weak campfire. It tasted better than anything Liz had had for months.

 

She didn’t say any of that, just waited while Connor Temple chased the remaining baked beans around his plate and Claudia cast looks at the table where Lyle and Lester were sitting, and occasionally fielded sympathetic looks from Abby. Eventually, she decided that she could either dangle in suspense for an hour or two, or take the initiative. There weren’t any more risks attached to asking questions than to not asking questions, at this point.

 

“Miss Brown?” she said quietly, and Miss Brown’s head turned so fast she almost got whiplash, if Liz was any judge. The hand she put up to her neck certainly suggested it.

 

“Liz.”

 

“What happens now?”

 

Miss Brown was silent for a moment, as if trying to think of a nice way of phrasing it. “Several people would like to ask you a lot of questions.”

 

“Including my – um, Mr – er...”

 

“Try Sir James,” Miss Brown recommended. “And yes, including him.”

 

“Oh,” Liz said, and poured herself a sustaining cup of coffee. Her father hadn’t had a knighthood. “Well, this isn’t going to be awkward _at all_.”

 

“I rather agree,” Miss Brown said, with a quick, worried glance over at her boss.

 

“He’s been watching me for at least the last ten minutes,” Liz informed her, from inside her coffee cup. “He might think he’s subtle, but once you learn to tell the difference between staring superciliously at the _Times_ and actually reading the _Times_ it’s really easy to spot.”

 

Miss Brown inhaled half her cup of tea, and nearly collapsed into her muesli from laughing too hard.

 

***

 

The Mitchells didn’t have anything resembling a board-room, Liz thought, or the whole thing would be even more surreal. For her interrogation – which looked as if it was going to be carried out by as many of the members of the mirror anomaly project as could fit into the room – they had apparently decided to use a function room whose chief use was as an office. It had once been makeshift, Liz thought, looking at the cardboard boxes of things neatly tucked against the walls, the coats hung up on pegs, the computers and desk lamps, but it had settled quite comfortably into the lines of an open-plan office, and probably now nobody remembered or cared that it had ever been any different. She wondered how long the anomaly project had been here.

 

She had a chair at one end of the large oval table, with nowhere to go but into walls if she tried to escape. The windows were locked, and Kermit and Adey were standing at the door, armed. Kermit at least looked moderately sheepish.

 

“I’m flattered,” Liz said aloud. “But I don’t know where you think I could go. I mean, I’m not even wearing shoes. You’ve got my boots and dinosaurs ate my trainers.”

 

Sir James raised an eyebrow at her and Liz almost choked. “Did they eat your homework, too?”

 

It took an effort to reply, he sounded so like her father obliquely telling her off, or at least letting her know she’d done something he disapproved of. “No. School’s out.”

 

“It’s October,” Miss Brown said rather more kindly.

 

“I was kidnapped in July.” Liz took her seat, and found a glass and a jug of water in front of her. She filled the glass on the principle that she had nothing else to do, and pushed it round the table, towards the people who were filing in. Connor had a seat close to her, and looked particularly keen; he’d carried in a plastic case, which, when opened, turned out to contain the black box Liz had been using to navigate the anomalies.

 

Lyle was there, and Liz sent a mental apology to her Jon, because she was a bit worried that this one was here – she knew he actively disliked her, although she didn’t know why. He was standing close behind Sir James, and the sight of them – almost but not quite the people she needed them to be – was upsetting. Liz stared at the polished wood of the table, so as not to have to look at them, and then took a gulp from her glass of water, with much the same idea in mind. She caught the eye of Miss Brown’s boyfriend by accident, and was astonished when he almost smiled at her. She nearly dropped the glass, which effectively put an end to her musings on the mirror versions of her dad and stepdad; she had to mop up the spilt water with her cuff.

 

Miss Brown passed her a packet of tissues. Liz muttered some embarrassed words of thanks and cleaned up the spill, grateful and confused. She was completely at sea here, and perhaps the most confusing thing of all was why Miss Brown seemed to like her so much, and to be influencing her boyfriend to like her.

 

“Don’t hurry on our account,” Sir James said, examining some notes. Liz blushed bright red and said something inaudible, then cursed herself for being an idiot and lifted her head to look him in the eye.

 

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she choked out, and the words were almost natural by the time she reached the end of the phrase.

 

“Pleased to hear it,” Sir James said. “Your name, if you please.”

 

“Liz,” she said simply, and then added, “Elizabeth Alison Lester. But only my mum calls me Elizabeth.”

 

Sir James looked as if he’d expected, or maybe hoped for, a different answer, but Miss Brown wrote it down anyway. “Have you got any documentation to prove that?”

 

“Er. No,” Liz said, feeling clueless and useless.

 

“I see. Can you tell us your date of birth?”

 

“August the twelfth, 1992.”

 

“Which would make you seventeen.”

 

“I think so?” Liz said dubiously. “I was kidnapped before my birthday, but I must’ve been gone more than a month. It’s hard to tell, because the days are different, and I don’t know how much time is happening at home. If that makes sense.”

 

Sir James nodded briefly. “Describe your family.”

 

Liz had the horrible feeling he was trying to catch her out, and also wondered how indiscreet she was going to have to be and what stage his relationship with Lyle was at. “My parents are divorced,” she said slowly. “They have been for a while. I was about thirteen when Dad moved out and I went with him. I live with my dad and my stepdad. My brother lives with my mum, because we don’t get on.” She caught a sudden straightness in Sir James’ spine, a glint in Lyle’s eyes, and wondered uneasily where she’d mis-stepped. “Basically because... I do CCF, and I’m gay? And she’s not very keen on either of those? I mean, you’d have to ask her why. I have, but it always ends in an argument.” She took a deep breath. “I had another brother. He died.”

 

There was a short silence. Liz took a gulp of water.

 

“Both my sons are alive.”

 

 All the water went up Liz’s nose and she made a strangled noise of delight, incredulity, and inability to breathe. “Jamie? Jamie’s alive? He didn’t – he stayed in remission? Did he even have leukaemia now, I mean, here, I mean – yeah. Here?”

 

“Here he did,” Sir James said, unbending slightly. “When did your brother die?”

 

The euphoria drained out of her system almost as quickly as it had flooded it. “A year and a bit ago.” She felt herself gritting her teeth and tensing instinctively, and forced herself to relax.

 

“Were you there?”

 

“I was _holding him_ ,” Liz snapped, and bit down hard on her lip. She tasted blood, and was almost tempted to apologise, but dismissed the temptation. It was his fault, not hers. He could live with a bit of sharpness.

 

There was a longer silence.

 

“On to more proximate matters,” Sir James said loudly. “You claim to have been kidnapped by Helen Cutter.”

 

“I’m not claiming it,” Liz said indignantly. “I _was_!”

 

“Be so good as to explain how she managed this... feat.”

 

“She got me when I was out running,” Liz said, embarrassed in retrospect. “In Battersea Park. I had headphones in, because I thought I was safe, and she had men with her. If it was just her I could’ve got away, but – there were six of them.” She shifted in her chair. “Did you know she clones people? I know it sounds weird, but I don’t know what else it could be, I mean, they’re all exactly alike. And they don’t – think, not really.”

 

“Describe the, ah, clones.”

 

“Blond hair. Ugly as hell. Built like brick shithouses. Blank eyes, with nothing behind them.” Liz suppressed a shudder. “They do whatever Helen tells them to do, except they don’t like me, so they used to push me around a bit, and once – when I left Helen behind, I was, um, liberating some stuff from one of her home bases, and I ran across some of them, and they tried to kill me.”

 

“Why did they dislike you?”

 

“I stabbed Helen with a penknife when she kidnapped me,” Liz said truthfully. “And they knocked me out, and when I woke up, I punched her and broke her nose. Also, I kept threatening her – verbal threats, and she ordered me to shoot someone once, and I... wouldn’t.”

 

“This was, I take it, later than the kidnap.”

 

“Weeks later. She thought she could trust me by then. I mean, the last time. The time with the gun.” Liz fidgeted. “She was wrong.”

 

“Did you shoot her?”

 

Liz blinked at him. “No. The clones would’ve killed me if I had. I just... fired at the ceiling and pointed the gun at her. And then I took the gun apart – I mean, I disassembled it, and dropped it on the floor and walked out.” She nodded at the black box. “Which is when I stole that. It was a lab, she wanted me to kill a scientist who worked there, and well, it was chaos, so nobody noticed me swiping that.”

 

“We’ll come to that later.” Sir James tapped his pen on the desk. “Why did Helen kidnap you?”

 

Liz hesitated. “I think she wanted someone to... to work with her. That’s what she told me. She wanted a right-hand woman.” She paused. “I think she was lonely.”

 

Sir James raised his eyebrows. “You felt sorry for her.”

 

Liz sniggered involuntarily. “What for? It was her own stupid fault she was alone. She could’ve gone home, she knew how. She could have been gone for, like, two years, instead of ten. And anyway, she has friends and stuff, sort of – backers, although I don’t know who they are now, I only met the ones that were far enough away in the future that I couldn’t just run away and go home.”

 

“Who provided you with your equipment?”

 

“Helen,” Liz answered. “She gave me a lot of stuff when I first woke up, and then there’s stuff I bought with money she gave me, and stuff I stole from her. Of the stuff I had on me when I was kidnapped, I’ve only got a t-shirt and some underwear.”

 

“What would you do if you saw her now?”

 

There was a certain stillness in the room, and Liz thought carefully about her answer. “ _Right_ now? Throw something at her. Tell her to fuck off. Hit her again.” She thought of something extra. “And then check if she had clones with her, and if so, run away, because they’re armed, and I’m not.”

 

“Very practical,” Sir James said dryly.

 

 She grinned at him, seeing the sneaking corner of a wry smile on his face. “Thanks.”

 

“Hmm. What happened after you were kidnapped, and hit Helen, and were given clothes and other equipment?”

 

“She took me travelling,” Liz said. “I can’t remember what the time periods were called mostly, but I know she took me to the Cretaceous, because she was trying to make me agree with her that anomalies are so beautiful you could live behind them all the time or whatever, and the Cretaceous is kind of spectacular? So is most of the past. But... the shine kind of wore off when I realised she wanted to make me think like her, and that was just another way of doing it, and – I didn’t like that.” She took a gulp of water, and actually got to drink this one. “She took me to the future, then. Cardiff, really far in the future, about a hundred and fifty years or something – she had a backer there, a guy called Simon Eaglescroft who was really rich and obsessed with the past. Like, if he were here he’d be drooling over your mobile phones and saying they were great examples of functional early communications technology or something, I don’t know, but the point is he was _loaded_ and Helen was using his house like her own. She took me to a fucking lousy dinner party, sorry about the languge but it _was_ , and to this bar where all the time travellers went. There were quite a lot of them. I think she was introducing me as the heir apparent.” She took another swallow, and added: “But not by my own name. She was using a false name, she had me use one too. She introduced me as her niece.”

 

“And after... the future?” There was a slight hesitation in Sir James’ voice.

 

“The – Plasticine, Plesticine, something like that. There are humans there. I told Helen it was a stupid idea, but she didn’t listen, she doesn’t really do advice or anything. I got shot, just not very badly.” She nodded at Miss Brown. “Miss Brown’s seen the scar. Also, Miss Brown’s hand is going to fall off.”

 

“No, it’s not,” Miss Brown said, scribbling to catch up.

 

Liz sat back and folded her arms. “Yes it is. Do I need to repeat anything?”

 

“The Pleistocene, you were shot,” Miss Brown said, finishing off. “No. Carry on.”

 

Liz looked at Sir James, who seemed rather annoyed that Miss Brown and Liz had taken over the questioning. “Continue, please,” he said.

 

“Right. Well. Um... yeah, after that we went to 2036. She wanted to visit a backer, I needed a doctor. And then the backer wanted to go to the Permian. Because he’s crazy. He didn’t get eaten, no thanks to him. And then there was a bit more travelling in the past, and then Helen tried to get me to kill someone, and then she sprained her ankle. I left her behind.”

 

There was a brief silence.

 

“As simple as that?” Stephen said. He sounded stunned.

 

Liz gave him a flat look. “I threatened her with a gun. She wanted me for an assistant, remember? Assistants who shoot people are no good, so I’m no use to her now. And I think I made it clear to her all I want to do is go home. There would be no point looking for me, because I wouldn’t go with her. And frankly, I’d kill myself rather than go with her. And she probably knows that.”

 

Miss Brown almost let go of her pen, but continued writing without a break, and Sir James asked another question. “So. What then?”

 

Liz searched for a way to describe travelling alone, and found none. “I walked alone,” she said. “Looking for a way home.”

 

“How long for?” Sir James asked.

 

“I don’t know,” Liz said. “You can’t... you can’t tell. A month, maybe. I don’t know.”

 

“Did anything happen? Did Helen come after you?”

 

“No,” Liz said, and shrugged. “The clones hunted me, once. I got sick. I think I would have died but someone left me food and stuff. I don’t know who. It can’t have been a regular traveller, you don’t carry boil-in-the-bag meals when you don’t know when you’ll next find a meal you don’t have to kill yourself. There’s no point.” She shifted in her seat. “You probably found a beanie in my rucksack. That’s from then. But mostly nothing happened. Nothing special. I didn’t see anyone, or anything.” She fell silent.

 

“You don’t have anything to say about that time? Nothing at all?”

 

Liz looked at him without comprehension. “No. There isn’t anything to say.” She kept to herself that she had thought she was going to go mad, but thought that perhaps she could see her unspoken words mirrored in the sudden grudging understanding in Lyle’s eyes and the grim look on Miss Brown’s boyfriend’s face. Thinking of that, she cleared her throat. “Can I ask a question?”

 

“No,” Sir James said, but Liz kept going anyway.

 

“I don’t recognise two of the people here, and I thought I knew all the key players in the anomaly project. I mean, maybe different people got hired in this universe or whatever, and maybe some people just aren’t here. Like, I can’t see Professor Cutter. Or hear him. It’s kind of hard to miss the professor. I know, I’ve tried.”

 

There was a new stillness in the room. Liz tensed, and read shock and grief off the faces of most of the people; Stephen wouldn’t meet her eyes and Abby stared at the ceiling. “What did I say?”

 

“You think Professor Cutter is alive,” Sir James said slowly.

 

“He was when last I checked,” Liz said. “Alive, kicking, and driving my father nuts every second Tuesday. Um – isn’t he, here?”

 

“He died a couple of years ago,” Stephen said, with a bereaved harshness in his voice. She knew the tone; she spoke in it herself sometimes. “In the Permian. Helen led him and five of Captain Ryan’s men into a trap.”

 

“Ryan?” Liz frowned. “Tom Ryan? He was my stepdad’s friend. Jon said he was killed.”

 

“I’m going to have to disagree with you there,” Miss Brown’s partner said.

 

Liz blinked at him. “Um... I’m being slow, but – okay, you mean you’re Captain Ryan?... Nice to meet you. You were one of the people I didn’t recognise, and now, um, now I know why. Okay. Um.”

 

“Who else don’t you recognise?” Sir James demanded.

 

Liz nodded at Stephen. “I heard Abby and Connor call you Stephen, but I don’t know a Stephen on the anomaly project, I’ve never met one. There are a bunch of people I only know by their last names, so maybe –”

 

“Hart,” Stephen said.

 

Liz knocked her glass over.

 

“I take it I’m also dead,” Stephen said rather wryly.

 

“Uh – yes,” Liz said, now thoroughly creeped out. “Um, nobody knows an Oliver Leek here, do they?”

 

“A colleague of mine attempted to foist a civil servant by that name on me,” Sir James said. “That was two years ago.”

 

“Okay, well, don’t hire him, and maybe you should have a look at what he’s up to now – because I don’t know anything, okay, I’ve only heard things, sometimes my dad has nightmares and – whatever it was was _bad_ , all right? Very, very bad. I mean, I don’t think Hart – the other Hart – was the only one to die.” She forcibly stopped herself babbling.

 

“I didn’t hire him because Human Resources told me he’d been pushed out of his last job thanks to a regrettable tendency to harass his female colleagues,” Sir James observed. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think this is the first and last time we will be thanking HR for anything. I do trust there’s no-one else around this table for you to pronounce doom on.”

 

“Hey, _you_ told me I was dead,” Liz said indignantly, soaking up her spilled water with more of Miss Brown’s tissues. “And no, no-one. Except Miss Brown is a dead ringer for someone else I knew, a woman called Jenny Lewis. Literally, everything but the dress sense is the same, and – _hang on a minute_. Miss Brown, what’s your first name?”

 

Miss Brown’s pen hadn’t moved for the past five minutes. Her eyes were fixed on Liz. “It’s Claudia,” she said, visibly holding her self-possession in place.

 

“Oh my God,” Liz said, staring. “You’re _Claudia Brown_. Professor Cutter _wasn’t_ crazy. Dad is going to flip shit when I tell him.”

 

“Explain,” Captain Ryan said.

 

“Yessir,” Liz said automatically, and nearly sniggered at the way Sir James pouted – but it was something in the harmonics of the captain’s voice that demanded the honorific. “It’s another thing I’m not supposed to know, but not a nightmare thing. I sort of picked it up in bits and pieces. Connor – I mean, Connor in my world – mentioned it once, and I would have asked him about it properly, but Abby trod on him. Jenny didn’t like to hear it talked about, she got angry the only time someone said Claudia in front of her. So I don’t know how accurate this is, but – basically, I think Professor Cutter came back from an anomaly into the Permian asking for Claudia Brown, except there was no Claudia? And my dad brought Jenny in to handle PR a week or two later, and she looked just like Claudia. And Professor Cutter is apparently always calling her Claudia Brown. Which obviously annoys her.” Liz made a vague hand gesture. “I think they had a sort of a thing that didn’t work out.”

 

A glance flew between Miss Brown and Captain Ryan that Liz couldn’t even begin to interpret, and Captain Ryan shifted slightly, then met Liz’s eyes.

 

“I came back from an anomaly into the Permian and didn’t recognise Claudia. We’d been friends ten years.”

 

“Maybe you banged your head?” Liz said, somewhat at a loss, and then grinned. “Or maybe you swapped anomalies. Our Cutter and you.”

 

“This is _not funny_ ,” Miss Brown said tightly.

 

“No,” Liz said, and added practically, “but you’re fine now, aren’t you?”

 

“That is _beside the point_.”

 

Liz looked her in the eye. “Is it?”

 

“Miss Brown means,” Sir James said, “that it should never have happened in the first place.”

 

“Well, yeah,” Liz said, feeling like her point was being missed. “But you’re okay now, aren’t you? You’re happy now. Unless I’m stupider than I think I am.” She shrugged. “Without the swap or whatever, would you be? You said you were just friends for ten whole years.”

 

Miss Brown stared at her. “That’s a very... unusual point of view.”

 

Liz stared back. “Well, I always knew travelling alone behind the anomalies was going to leave me batshit crazy. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

 

Miss Brown’s eyes narrowed. “In a manner of speaking.”

 

Liz shrugged, and mentally awarded herself a point.

 

Connor cleared his throat. “Um.”

 

“Yes, Mr Temple, what is it?” Sir James said, in the tones of much-tried patience.

 

“Er, the machine thing...”

 

“The floor is yours.”

 

Connor looked at Liz, and pushed the black box towards her. “How does it work? I mean, I guess it’s a thing for predicting anomalies, right?”

 

“Sort of,” Liz said. “I don’t know. I saw Helen using one like it, so when I saw it, I nicked it. It finds anomalies that are about to happen and anomalies that are already open, I think. I don’t know how it works.”

 

“I can find that out,” Connor said confidently, and then hesitated. “But where’s the on button?”

 

There was a short pause.

 

“Wow,” Liz said. “You know, I was told you were a genius.”


	23. Chapter 23

 

The meeting broke up, or at least dismissed Liz and decamped elsewhere, after Liz helped Connor to turn on the black box and explained what she’d done with it; she’d left Connor and Stephen bent over its innards with an assortment of small screwdrivers and other tools scattered around them, exclaiming and questioning. Blade was standing behind them, pretending to be keeping an eye on Liz, but actually looking significantly more interested in the black box, and Liz remembered that he’d studied electrical engineering and owned a surprising number of books on popular physics, hidden behind a taste for throwaway military thrillers. She decided that Blade could probably prevent them from electrocuting themselves, and that she was of no use – so she went to enquire about the whereabouts of her rucksack.

 

Captain Ryan let her have it, although she noticed that the money, the knife, the multi-tool and the fish-hooks and line had been removed. There were massive rents in it, so she mended these with duct tape and Miss Brown’s stapler before checking that she hadn’t lost too much of the contents. The reflective blanket and her binoculars were gone, and her bivouac bag was torn, but it seemed as if the anomaly project’s depredations had done more real damage than the flying dinosaurs. She took out her clothes and announced her intentions of washing them, on the grounds that she probably wouldn’t get another such chance, and was conducted to a room containing a row of industrial washing machines, some of which looked excitingly new and functional. Liz remembered from seeing bits of her stepdad’s uniform all over the floor – sometimes mixed with portions of her father’s work suits – that the anomaly project was pretty hard on clothes, and speculated about whether the project had bought the machines, or the hotel.

 

She had found a net bag to put her sports bras in, and was just stuffing a capsule of washing liquid and fabric softener into the back of the machine, when she was addressed by an unfamiliar voice. She withdrew her head from the washing machine, banging it on the door as she went, and looked up at the speaker – a motherly looking woman in her late forties or early fifties. She rose to her feet. “Um. Mrs Mitchell, I presume?”

 

“Call me Mary,” Mary Mitchell said, shaking hands and giving Liz an appraising look that made Liz feel like one of her own cadets, possibly one being taught to march in step by her, or suffering Simon Price’s gimlet eye as he inspected poorly cleaned kit.  “And you must be Liz. Claudia didn’t say your haircut was that bad.”

 

Liz blushed. “I didn’t have a mirror. Er, sorry for descending on your washing machines without asking, but –”

 

Mary waved away Liz’s apologies. “You’re welcome to use them. I would have put your things in myself, but Ryan’s men were still checking over your bag.”

 

Liz couldn’t stop herself rolling her eyes. “I seriously don’t know what they thought I had in there. Er, thank you for lending me your kids’ clothes. Prehistoric travel is kind of hard on the wardrobe.”

 

“I’m somehow not surprised,” Mary said, and eyeballed Liz. “You had breakfast before they got started with their questions?”

 

“Yes,” Liz said. “Can I just say, the coffee was _amazing_.”

 

Mary hid a smile. “Thank you. Now, do you have anything in particular to do, or can I borrow you?”

 

“I don’t think so?” Liz said, casting an uncertain glance at Kermit, who was trailing her around the place, probably on Captain Ryan’s orders. Liz was perfectly comfortable with him: she had never found any version of Kermit especially difficult to overawe when she wanted to, and suspected that this one would let her get away with anything reasonable, but was probably also eavesdropping diligently.

 

Mary looked at Kermit, who shook his head. “The boss didn’t mention anything. But she can’t leave the hotel.”

 

“That’s fine,” Mary said. “I was in the middle of supervising lunch. How good are you at cooking?”

 

“Very,” Liz said confidently, “except I might be a bit... out of practice. I can fix things, too, if there’s anything that’s broken. I helped J- er, my stepdad clear his mum’s gutter once, that was fun.” She didn’t know how much Mary had been told about her, but thought it would probably be unwise to refer to her parents by name. She also didn’t add that they had been four storeys up on the roof of Julia Denton’s sizeable home, alternately drinking beer and apple juice, removing leaves from the clogged gutter, and returning rude answers to the comments from their audience down below. Liz had got sunburnt, which was a good thing in her book, because it prevented her father from noticing that she had been drinking rather less apple juice and rather more beer than he would have allowed.

 

Mary grinned. “That could come in handy. Well, come with me, and we’ll see what we can find you to do so you don’t collapse with boredom. And we’ll see what we can do about your hair, as well. I’m sorry, Liz, but have you looked in a mirror lately?”

 

“Yes,” Liz said, and flipped Kermit off when he sniggered.

 

Mary bit her lip on a smile. “I can manage a basic haircut. At least, I can render your hair tidier than it is.”

 

Liz huffed out a breath, blowing her ragged fringe up two inches and temporarily allowing her to see what was in front of her nose. She refrained from saying that improving it wouldn’t be a difficult task. “That would be great, thanks.”

 

 

 Miss Brown found her as Liz was helping Mary put lunch on the table, two hours later. “Mary, have you seen – oh.” She blinked at Liz, took a pace back, and inspected her with her head on one side.

 

“Do I pass muster?” Liz enquired sweetly, piling bread rolls into a basket.

 

Miss Brown allowed herself a small smile. “You’re much improved. I can actually see your face quite clearly now.”  


Liz cast her eyes heavenwards. One of the first things Mary had done was drag her into her own kitchen, sit her down on a chair with a towel around her shoulders, and take a comb and a pair of long-bladed scissors to the worst excesses of Liz’s hairstyle. Liz had been forced to sit still and keep quiet, on the grounds that Mary’s scissors always seemed to be in easy reach of her vulnerable ears or neck, but the result was a massive improvement – a short, neat haircut with a blunt fringe just above her eyebrows, significantly more manageable than the earlier mess. Liz had thanked her, and swept up the fallen hair on the floor, just to prove how thankful she was.

 

“Can I have a word in private? If you don’t need her, Mary?”

 

Mary looked at Liz, and then shook her head.

 

“I’ll just take this out,” Liz said, indicating the basket, and feeling a certain amount of foreboding.

 

Miss Brown nodded, and followed her out into the main eating area, where Liz left the basket of rolls on the big table where the food was usually put out. Then they went out of the hotel entirely, into the garden, and Miss Brown led her around the front of the hotel to the back lawn. There were a number of soldiers on guard, which Liz suspected was a Helen-inspired precaution – maybe they thought Helen would come back for her, in which case all Liz could say was that they obviously hadn’t heard a word she’d said earlier.

 

“Sit with me,” Miss Brown said, and took a seat on an iron bench by a rather lackadaisical gravel path, looking out over the lawn, on which the smallest Mitchell was practising her handstands, well out of earshot.

  
            Liz sat down. “Can I just ask, is there really such a thing as private around here?”

 

“Not indoors,” Miss Brown said, with a slight grimace. “Here...” She twisted in her seat. “Connor’s window is closed, so yes.”

 

Liz raised her eyebrows and looked down at her feet. She still didn’t have shoes on, but Miss Brown didn’t seem to have noticed that, and it was cold outside. She drew them up onto the bench and looped her arms around her knees. “You wanted to tell me something.”

 

“Yes.” Miss Brown looked out over the lawn, and then back at Liz. “We’ve come to some conclusions about your residence here.”

 

“Residence?” Liz said suspiciously.

 

“We’re not pitching you out to live behind the anomalies alone,” Miss Brown said with asperity. “You’ve had plenty of close calls; you admit that yourself.”

 

“Good point. What did m- what did Sir James say?”

 

Miss Brown was silent for a moment. “He concedes that you most likely are an alternate version of his daughter from another timeline. One that lived. He is prepared to offer you his spare room, if that suits you, but he would rather you used a different first name. Jamie, you see –”

 

Liz was shaking her head. “I’m grateful for the offer. I can’t even – I mean, he must feel like complete shit about the way J- Lyle acted at first to say I could come and stay with him. But if he wants to hide this from Jamie, it’s no good. I can’t. One, I can’t hold up living with Jamie, and having him not know I’m his sister, even if this is a different version of him. Two, he’ll _guess_. It doesn’t matter how many fake names I use. He’ll work it out, and then he’ll be really upset. I’d be pissed off, but Jamie is sweeter than me. He’d just be all... disappointed. Staying with Sir James won’t work unless he tells Jamie the truth, and he’s not going to do that, is he? And anyway.” She swallowed. “Look, I – they – I want to go _home_. It would just be some kind of weird counterfeit.”

 

Miss Brown looked at her for one long moment, a pity in her eyes that made Liz itch, and then looked down at her hands, pleating the material of her sensible black trousers. “I understand.”

 

“Do you have the ARC in this timeline? And does it still have bunkrooms?” Liz knew all about the bunkrooms. The number of times she’d called her father at eleven o’clock to check on him and insisted he get someone to drive him home or sleep there instead beggared belief. “I could stay there.”

 

Miss Brown looked moderately appalled. “You shouldn’t have to do that.”

 

“It’ll be a hell of a lot nicer than everywhere I’ve been sleeping for the past th- f- oh, fuck it.  Behind the anomalies.”

 

“That’s probably true. Do you really not know how long you’ve been gone?”

 

“I have _no_ clue,” Liz said furiously. “It’s so fucking frustrating – you can’t even count days, because sometimes you go through an anomaly and it’s night, sometimes days are shorter or there are more of them, sometimes you go through several anomalies a day, sometimes you just lose count – I know it must have been more than a couple of months, but...” She shrugged helplessly, anger draining out of her as fast as it had seized her, and then thought of something. “What’s the time?”

 

“Half-past twelve,” Miss Brown said, consulting her watch. “Why?”

 

Proudly, Liz set the half-forgotten watch on her left wrist to the right time, and waved it at Miss Brown. “I haven’t been able to use this since Helen first kidnapped me.”

 

Miss Brown smiled. “You do have another option, of course.”  


“Another what?” Liz asked without really paying attention, examining the watch and wondering if it was in need of a new battery.

 

“Aside from Sir James’ flat and the ARC.”

 

“Oh?” Liz said curiously, looking up.

 

Miss Brown took a deep breath. “You could stay with me and Tom.”

 

Liz’s jaw dropped, and she stared at Miss Brown for several moments, stunned. “What – _really_? I mean, after I said all that stuff, are you _sure_ –”

 

“It was all common sense,” Miss Brown said graciously, then tucked a hank of auburn hair behind her ear and said with considerably more animation: “Obnoxious common sense, of course, but then anyone’s social graces would be lacking after a few months of living with Helen.”

 

Liz couldn’t help it; she snorted. “Okay, maybe _that’s_ true.”

 

“So.” Miss Brown rested her hands on her knees. “What do you think?”

 

Liz smiled shyly. “I think that would be great, thanks. If you don’t mind, and Captain Ryan doesn’t mind.”

 

“Of course not,” Miss Brown said, and smiled at her. “It was our idea, after all.” She hesitated. “And about a new name...”

 

“That’s not a problem,” Liz told her. “I’ve done it before. Just... I don’t know... Lisa? That’s enough like Liz that people won’t make too many mistakes, or it’ll sound normal, anyway. And I obviously can’t use Lester because I’m not staying with Sir James, and... I don’t want to upset him. I mean, you know.”

 

Miss Brown nodded sympathetically.

 

“Lewis,” Liz decided. “I can borrow Jenny’s name. She won’t mind and I won’t forget it.”

 

“Useful,” Miss Brown observed, although Liz thought she maybe wasn’t too keen on the Lewis bit. “Lisa Lewis. That sounds quite nice, actually.” She nodded. “I’ll see if I can’t manage some ID for you.”

 

“Thanks,” Liz said, and added: “And can I have the money Helen gave me back? I have, like, one shirt and one pair of trousers.”

 

Miss Brown winced. “Of course. Do you have enough for some more clothes? And you’ll need a toothbrush and things like that.”

 

“I think so?” Liz said. “It was actually quite a lot of money. I wouldn’t have wanted to carry it about like that if it weren’t for the fact that we never spent any time in the modern era. But it could come in handy, now.” She shrugged. “I think she wanted me to have enough to buy a safe place to stay, more than anything else.”

 

“Very sensible of her,” Miss Brown said, sounding totally at sea.

 

“It – she was _weird_ ,” Liz said bluntly, wanting to explain to someone. “She looked after me when I was sick and she tricked me into doing what she wanted me to and she gave me things I needed and she asked me to kill someone. I think she kind of thought she was being maternal, but she had a really fucking strange way of going about it.”

 

“Are you sorry you left her?” Miss Brown asked, watching Liz with caution in those soft brown eyes.

 

“What?” Liz said in surprise. “No.” She let her eyes stray out into the trees surrounding the lawn, and ran a hand through her short hair. Clean for once, it fell neatly back into place. “The only thing I’m sorry about is... I missed a bunch of chances to run away. There were times when I could’ve done but I didn’t, because I didn’t think I’d be able to get away, or because I didn’t think I would survive if I did.” She bent her head a little, staring malevolently out over her knees, mouth pressed into the slightly frayed knees of the borrowed jeans she was wearing. “I wish I’d made one of those chances work, and then maybe I’d be home now.”

 

Miss Brown stood, and put a hand on her shoulder. “No-one is ever allowed to know what might have been,” she said, and Liz could hear the quote in her voice but couldn’t place it.

 

Liz grunted something, and then twisted as she heard a person. Captain Ryan was quite close behind them; she saw Miss Brown smile automatically.

 

“Lunch,” Ryan said.


	24. Chapter 24

Liz went home with Miss Brown and Ryan after the spike in anomalies had worn off, with no sign of any more modern anomalies through which Liz’s home might have been found; she sat in the back of Captain Ryan’s car, while they talked quietly in the front, and fell asleep, as she regularly did when given a chance to sit down. Ditzy had diagnosed exhaustion in his checks on the state of her shoulder, and told her to eat and sleep. Liz promptly mumbled something and fell asleep on the bed in his makeshift infirmary, a state of affairs which precipitated much cursing and Ditzy enlisting Kermit and Adey to carry her upstairs to the room which had been found for her.

 

Liz only woke up when the car drew to a stop and Captain Ryan twisted the car into a very small parking space with forensic accuracy, and Miss Brown turned in her seat. “We’re home, Liz. Lisa.”

 

Liz grinned rather sleepily. “You’re having a harder time with that than I am, aren’t you?”

 

Ryan chuckled, and Miss Brown hit him with a rolled-up copy of the _Financial Times_.

 

“’Sa time?” Liz mumbled, checking her watch with the justifiable pride of someone who’d been able to use it for exactly three days, and found that it was six o’clock in the afternoon. “Six. I could make dinner.”

 

Miss Brown shook her head, taking her bag out of the boot, and Liz slung her rucksack across her good shoulder and used her good arm to pass Ryan his own kit, before shutting the boot. “We’ve been gone a week, there won’t be anything in the fridge.”

 

Liz yawned. “Freezer?”

 

Ryan propelled her up to quite a small, newish-looking house in a street of small, newish-looking houses, which had clearly been built to resemble the Georgian terraced houses close by without being anything like the size, and Claudia let them in. “You’ll be asleep by the time it’s defrosted, young lady.”  


“ _Young lady_ ,” Liz repeated disparagingly, and relieved the pressure on her pent-up helpfulness by making three cups of coffee and sorting out the sheets on the spare bed she was due to use.

 

The weekend passed quietly, and mostly consisted of Liz learning Ryan and Miss Brown’s routine and frequently being reminded to call them Tom and Claudia. They had returned from the Forest of Dean on a Friday evening; Liz went out on the Saturday armed with the cash Helen had given her – which appeared to have increased suspiciously since Liz had last checked. She bought two pairs of jeans, three shirts, some fresh socks and underwear, a pair of shoes that were both moderately smarter than walking boots and reduced to clear, and two jumpers, along with essential toiletries and a cheap canvas book bag, chiefly because of the picture of a dinosaur on a bicycle. She thanked whoever had thought up charity shops several times, both silently and under her breath; she was able to acquire the two jumpers, canvas bag and one of the shirts for under twenty pounds.

 

She went into the ARC on Monday with Claudia and Tom, and was hauled in front of a camera and made to fill out a form for a pass which disingenuously referred to her as Lisa Lewis, civilian researcher, and given a cheap office phone with numbers pre-programmed into it on the grounds that she needed to stay in contact. “Do try not to lose it in an anomaly,” Claudia said, grimacing, “Sir James takes a very dim view of that,” and Liz tucked it into her pocket and swore a variety of lurid oaths saying that she wouldn’t.

 

Mostly, that first day, she helped Connor with the black box, or let Stephen ask her endless questions on survival behind the anomalies, the food she had eaten, and predator behaviour, a steady low mutter of Connor trying to identify the creatures she was talking about in the background as Stephen scribbled down her uncertain answers. She felt as if her head had been turned inside out with a spoon and stirred by lunchtime, and was only too glad to disappear on the pretext of helping Abby feed the few animals in the ARC’s holding pens. There was a burst of false alarms on the ADD in the afternoon; Liz sat watching Connor curse and burn himself on the exposed wires, occasionally passing him tools as she was asked to. There were, however, no real anomalies. Liz understood that this was cause for celebration, on the grounds that anomalies were usually omnipresent, and the team found themselves racing around the UK trying to keep things under control. Liz certainly hadn’t expected that members of the anomaly project would be able to spend the day as Claudia did, holed up in her office catching up on back paperwork, so that Liz and Tom got sworn at for intruding, apologised to in a flurry, and firmly sent away while Claudia wallowed in Health and Safety.

 

The rest of the week proved no more exciting – although there were several anomaly call-outs, Liz was not asked to join the team, and in fact was specifically told to stay behind. She deduced that she was on probation, a guess borne out by the way the others treated her and by Claudia’s flapping when Liz asked her directly. Having survived the first day she was given a computer ID so she could amuse herself by playing games, Wikipedia-surfing, and reading the least interesting reports from anomaly callouts, and even allowed into the gym, where Liz stayed for a boring but well-spent hour or two to replace the fact that she couldn’t go outside without Claudia or Tom and they were both occupied. She played darts with Blade and cards with Kermit, and distinguished herself by beating the latter hollow and being a gracious loser when the former pasted her into the floor. Abby discovered that she had once taken kickboxing lessons (although she had taken a violent dislike to the teacher and switched to judo, where the martial art suited her better and the teacher didn’t inspire fantasies of beating him to a pulp) and offered to spar with her, which was better than any of the former amusements. The fact that the soldiers insisted on betting on the outcome was outweighed by the fact that Adey, who was wrapped firmly round Abby’s little finger, was more than happy to help them place anonymous bets and get a large cut of the winnings whichever of them won. And in any case, Abby had a lot to teach Liz; Liz wondered why, in her own timeline, she and Tanya Lacey had never invited Abby to join in.

 

Liz didn’t see Sir James – at least, not clearly. Lyle was around, and surprised Liz by behaving far more kindly towards her than she had expected him to - it depressed Liz that this now only made her rather suspicious – but Sir James neither sought her out, nor spoke to her, nor even passed her in the corridors. Stephen, descending to previously unplumbed depths of perceptiveness, told her kindly that most people didn’t see much of Sir James, but Liz just thought that he didn’t want to see her – and also that she couldn’t really blame him. She was slowly getting less thin, less tanned, less obviously scarred and less alien all round, she noticed it as the week went on. Sir James wouldn’t want to see someone who probably looked more like his dead daughter every day.

 

Still, every now and then Liz would turn suddenly, or glance into a bit of reflective glass, and she’d catch Sir James looking at her from the office at the top of the atrium, or beside the coffee machine, and she’d wonder. Was he just keeping an eye on her, or what?

 

She asked Tom on Friday evening when she was finishing the Herculean task of unblocking the sink, and Tom was pouring out a glass of wine for Claudia, on the grounds a) that he ought to be off-guard at this time of day and b) he was more likely to give her a straight answer quicker than Claudia. She was wrong on the former count: he gave her a sharp look and observed that he’d thought she might ask.

 

Liz screwed the U-bend back in very carefully. “’S the obvious question.”

 

“Except it doesn’t have any answer.” Tom fished two cans of beer out of the fridge and threw one at her. She caught it one-handed and sat up, tugging at the ring-pull. “Or at least not a simple one.”

 

“What’s the complicated one, then?” Liz demanded, taking a gulp of her beer.

 

Tom leaned against the kitchen counter and stared up at the ceiling. “I think he wonders if you are his daughter or not. Whether Elizabeth would have been anything like you, if she’d had the chance to grow up.” He opened his own beer. “Maybe he even wonders if he somehow swapped his daughter’s life for his son’s. If when he was saying he’d do anything to make Jamie live, he sacrificed Elizabeth.”

 

Liz’s mouth went dry, liquid refreshment notwithstanding. “Deals with the devil only happen in books.”

 

Tom caught her eye. “Are you sure he agrees with you?”

 

There was a short silence, broken by Claudia coming into the kitchen, damp and flushed from the shower. “I could have sworn I had a glass of wine floating around here somewhere,” she began, and then noticed Liz, cross-legged and solemn on the floor with a can in her hand. She frowned slightly. “Are you old enough to drink?”

 

 “Yeah,” Liz said unblushingly. She’d survived alone behind the anomalies. She felt like half the anomaly project was younger than her, sometimes - particularly Connor. She now understood the gallons of venom her dad had once put into the word ‘keen’ when describing Connor’s attitude to anomalies.


	25. Chapter 25

The next day, she went on a minor excursion. Just to satisfy some personal curiosity.

 

She had enough money left over to buy an off-peak train ticket, and Claudia was easily wheedled into letting her out alone; the older woman had definitely begun to trust her, and Tom had the sense to know she wouldn’t run away because she had nowhere to run to. Liz also had her phone with her, and she strongly suspected that it was bugged somehow, to track her whereabouts. The idea amused her, somehow; she felt almost benevolent when she kept it on and in her pocket.

 

            Having walked untold miles in the course of her travels across time, Liz Lester was unimpressed by the idea that she ought to catch a bus to somewhere as close as Waterloo- particularly when the bus fare, without an Oystercard discount, was so expensive. She knew her way around London well enough, and it wasn’t as if anything had changed in this world architecturally speaking, so it was an easy walk to the train station and through Waterloo station until she managed to pick the train she wanted and buy a ticket from the automatic machine. That done, she idled around on the platform until the train turned up and she got on it, choosing a window seat on one side of a small plastic table and vanishing behind a thriller pilfered from Captain Ryan’s bookshelves.

 

            She looked reasonably anonymous, with her dinosaur book bag sitting on her lap, her messily cut hair (the fringe was tidy, so she looked pretty normal from the front, but Mary hadn’t been able to do very much about the back; still, it might pass for an edgy haircut at a distance and in poor light) her waterproof jacket zipped up and the rainbow scarf Claudia had obliged her to take, muttering about sharp winds and catching colds and bloody idiots poorly dressed, wrapped around her throat. Looking at the rain outside, she would probably have been better off forcing an umbrella on Liz. Liz was unaccustomed to maternal care, and was therefore unable to decide either whether Claudia was giving free rein to her motherly instincts or whether she liked it. It was more than likely, Liz thought, that she was just fussing over a guest.

 

            “Is this seat taken?”

 

            Liz looked up, and was confronted by a nervous teenager with a cut-glass accent, pointing at the seat beside her. “Reserved,” she said, nodding at the little white card above the seat, which had in fact been nicked from a seat two carriages down just in case this kind of thing happened. She wanted the freedom to get out if she had to; the past months had taught her the value of escape routes. “Sorry. Try further down.”

 

            The teenager went away, and Liz buried herself in the novel. Nobody tried to talk to her, as she had anticipated, but to cover all emergencies she put a pair of iPod headphones in, leading into her book bag. As it happened, there was no iPod and the headphones were broken; Connor Temple had discarded them and Liz had found them lying about the place and pocketed them, but even if she missed her own iPod, they served their purpose. Not even the ticket collector tried to talk to her: he just scribbled on her ticket and moved on.

 

            A few hours later, the train reached its destination, the last stop on its journey. Liz got off and went to find a bus timetable; ten minutes after that she was on a bus rattling out of town, and after half an hour standing next to a woman and her inquisitive small child she hopped off the bus into a small village.

 

            Here she was slightly anxious, and resolved to be careful. In her own timeline, people in this village had known her since she was very small, because this was where her father had grown up and where her uncle still lived when it suited him, and they might look more closely than would suit her purposes. And what if she encountered the other-timeline version of her uncle? Ralph Lester was a shrewd man, and the changes weeks of little sleep, not much food and constant danger had wrought on her might not be much of a disguise to him. She ought to have chosen a better fake name. Lisa was a little too close to Liz for comfort. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t managed a more different alias before- it wasn’t as if she couldn’t do it. Every time she’d been in something resembling a modern day setting she’d used a different name, and she’d coped well enough.

 

            It didn’t matter. Ralph wasn’t likely to believe that his niece had come back from the dead, and she could avoid too much danger; the big ramshackle house Ralph owned was a little out of the village and at the opposite end to the church, and she could buy a bottle of water and a snack or something from the shop next to the post office. It wasn’t as if he was often there, anyway. She promised herself the snack as a reward for afterwards, shifted the strap of the book bag and tenderly prodded her shoulder injury, which was itching hellishly as it healed.Then she set off for the church.

 

            Liz examined the building as she let herself into the churchyard, through a sturdy wooden gate and porch. Nothing had changed here; it was exactly as she remembered from her own timeline, a small parish church dating back to Norman times, periodically losing bits or falling prey to lead thieves. There was probably even a piece of paper on the cork board she knew would be just inside the vestry, detailing the rota by which vicars from nearby churches visited to hold services.

 

            She let her eyes wander across the grassy expanse, punctuated by gravestones and memorials, some as simple as wooden crosses, others far more elaborate, some half-covered by moss, others scrupulously cleaned. She was looking for one in particular. She didn’t know what it would look like, she hadn’t dared ask – Sir James didn’t even know she was here, and no-one else at the ARC with the possible exception of Lyle would know exactly where it was - but it would be relatively new, only about three years old, and, of course, it would have her name on it. She didn’t know for certain it was here, but generations of Lesters had found a resting place here, final wishes and practicalities allowing. She couldn’t think of anywhere else Elizabeth would have been buried.

 

            Liz shuddered at the thought and the memory of a voice just like her father’s telling her how this world’s version of her had died. A car accident - the kind that happened every day on the streets of London. It was all too easy to see Nicky running into the road to try to cross, and herself chasing after him, thinking to pull him back, and then the screech of brakes and the child’s body flung through the air to land broken on the tarmac...

 

            Liz shook her head vigorously and headed for the newest stones; it stood to reason that she would find it there. After a few moments she found the very newest and started to scan along them; Mary Collins, 3rd June 1999 aged seventy-four, and of her husband Sam Collins, 22nd January 2000... Lucy Smith, 4th May-20th July 2001, suffer the little children to come unto me... Oliver Poste, 15th September 1909-12th April 2003, beloved son, husband, father and grandfather... In Memoriam Julianne Edith March, departed this life aged sixty-nine 10th September 2004...

 

            There. There it was, a solid, square granite tombstone, the letters deeply carved for posterity. It was clean, with no moss on it. Someone had planted flowers there, and there was a sketch marked by wind and weather tucked under a jar of wilting roses - Liz did not need to see the signature to know her father’s style of drawing, but she did not look closely at it. She was too busy reading the inscription.

 

ELIZABETH ALISON LESTER

‘LIZ’

12th AUGUST 1992

15th JUNE 2006

TAKEN TOO SOON.

 

            Liz sat down on the cold, damp grass and drew her knees up to her chest. She didn’t want to cry, but she felt strangely empty inside, and she wondered if someone else would have been crying – if Elizabeth, in her place, would have been crying. If it would have been the normal thing to do. Faced with the actual words on her actual tombstone, the dead Liz Lester finally felt real, and the living one felt an uncontrollable shivering her thick woollen jumper, jacket and scarf couldn’t ward off. It was useless to remind herself that it was not really her body in that coffin: her name was still there.

 

            Bitterly, Liz cursed Helen Cutter, _I bet you never had to face this!_ and then stopped; of course, she had. Helen had been dead to everyone who knew her in her own timeline for eight whole years. She had had a tombstone and a funeral, or a memorial service, whatever it had been called. Still, at least she had chosen to go into exile, not been ambushed, cracked over the head after a bloody fight and dragged through an anomaly on her Sunday morning run. Little details like that made all the difference.

 

            “Excuse me, miss,” a concerned voice said from a foot or so behind her ear.

 

            Liz gasped, and almost leapt out of her skin, spinning on the balls of her feet, hand flying for a knife she didn’t have. This was _not_ how she’d survived living in times not her own! You never, ever relaxed! That meant _death_. Just because this time looked like her own didn’t mean it was, just because Claudia and Tom had been so kind to her didn’t mean she was safe...

 

            And then she registered the face before her: kindly, anxious for her and distinctly geriatric. She could probably tie him in a knot without really trying, but it would be more appropriate to be very polite to him, call him ‘sir’ and open doors for him. Liz forced herself to relax.

 

            “Are you all right?” the old man asked. He might be a verger or a churchwarden, or something. Liz had no idea who hung round churches on a regular basis, other than vicars.

 

            “I- uh.” Liz wiped her dry eyes, playing for time, hating the way a lie was spinning itself together in her mind on automatic, because this and fishing for knives like Blade on an edgy day was how she lived. “No, not really...”

 

            “Did you know her?” he enquired, looking at the gravestone.

 

            “No... I-  No. I... see, I’m on a gap year. I’ve just done four months backpacking in Australia,” she lied, picking a country from the corners of her mind and praying the man she was lying to had never been to Australia. “And I’ve been doing a little family research. A lot of family research, actually. I was adopted. I think this Lester is a cousin of mine and - and I...” She waved a hand futilely and stared dully at the grass, doing her best to look upset.

 

            “Oh. Oh dear,” he said. He looked sad for her. She knew she was doing a much worse job of looking bereaved than she was, and was slightly embarrassed, but the embarrassment was swallowed up in the numbness. “I am so sorry. What’s your name?”

 

            “Oh- I. I’m Lisa. Lisa Lewis.” Liz rose to her feet and brushed grass off her jeans, blinking tears away. Damn - a flaw in her lie. What if Ralph was breaking the habit of a lifetime by actually _living_ in the big house, rather than treating it as a convenient place to snooze between work trips? Since she was ostensibly family-hunting, the man might want to introduce her, and that was taking too much of a risk. Why did she always think of these things afterwards?

 

            “What a pretty name. My name is Wallace, Adam Wallace. I’m a bell-ringer here. Would you like to come inside the church, Miss Lewis? There’s a kettle and some mugs. A cup of tea? Good for shock, I believe.”

 

            “Yes, I think - Please call me Lisa,” Liz said, head reeling. ‘Miss Lewis’ belonged to Jenny, and Liz _hated_ tea.

 

            “Lisa, then.”

 

            They went down through the churchyard and into the little church. It was not locked, but the plate was kept in a safe inside a cupboard next to the tea mugs and sugar, if Liz’s memories of the church in her timeline held true, and it was still the same welcoming place Liz remembered from several childhood Christmases, with drawings by the Sunday School children pinned up on one of the walls and a chaotic cork board covered in newsletters and tales of fundraisers or mislaid dogs nearby. She followed him into the bell-ringers’ room, looking up at the bell-ropes as he made the tea, boiling the kettle and taking down sugar and mugs.

 

            “There’s a chair over there, Lisa, if you’d like to sit down... You said you were looking for family?” Mr. Wallace said.

 

            Liz hooked the chair a little towards her with one foot, the one still aching from the bite it had received, and sat down, furiously thinking up further lies. “Yes. Sort of. Because, well- I told you I was adopted. My parents- my adoptive parents- they never kept it from me. I grew up knowing. I only started looking for my real family now, now I really have the time to do it. It’s been a little difficult, because my – mother- was a teenage mother and she picked up her life and went on afterwards. She became a freelance journalist. Very intrepid. Only...” Her voice faded away, possibly the result of an overdose of sentiment, possibly the result of a need to construct another shameless lie to go on top of the first two. “She caught a disease when she was working in- in India and it killed her. Six years ago now. I knew that already – she left me some money in her will, I came into it last year. Anyway, I found her parents, my grandparents, but they didn’t want to know me. Apparently I look a lot like her. So I’ve been looking for other relatives, compiling a family tree, sort of, trying to talk to people. She was an only child, so it’s not as if I have aunts and uncles, but there are other relatives. I think that poor girl was some kind of a cousin of mine, I’m not sure.”

 

            “Oh, that’s sad. I’m so sorry about your mother. You know-“ he paused- “there’s a Lester living near here. Little Liz’s uncle. He’s not here at the moment, he’s working in Cornwall, but I could give you an address to write to if you’d like?”

 

            “That would be great, thank you, Mr. Wallace,” Liz said, and took down the address he gave her on a scrappy piece of paper, tucking it safely into her backpack. She sipped politely at the tea he passed her. She couldn’t bloody stand tea, it was worse than she remembered, but she’d eaten and drunk worse things lately. Had Elizabeth liked it?

 

“Are you staying in the area?” Mr. Wallace asked her. “Or have you come up from London?”

 

“Up from London,” Liz said. That, at least, was true. “Well, actually I was staying with friends who live a bit closer- sort of halfway –and I thought I’d come up here and do a little more research...” She shrugged, half-sheepishly. “I’m lousy at it. I wasn’t even looking for that poor girl- Liz, I think. Yeah, Liz. I was hoping to find a Mrs. Isobel Maitland. My...” She cast her eyes up to the ceiling and pretended to count on her fingers as if working something out. “Great-aunt. That’s right, great-aunt. But-” she glanced at her watch and stood up hurriedly- “I have to catch a train back to London in about an hour. I wasted half my time because I went to the wrong village at first. I think I’d better go or I’ll miss the bus back to the station...”

 

“You had,” Mr. Wallace agreed, in a sympathetic flutter. “Oh dear. The bus comes every half-hour, you’d better hurry to catch it- and I do hope you manage to find the rest of your, ah, birth family. Good luck!”

 

“Thank you. And thank you for the tea,” she added, although she’d barely drunk any of it, and then she left.

 

When, some hours later, she knocked on Claudia and Tom’s door and was let in by Tom, he enquired: “Did you find it?”

 

Liz nodded, and stood on the threshold, staring at her feet and fiddling with the strap of her book bag, feeling bizarrely subdued. Tom clapped her on the shoulder in wordless sympathy, told her to get her head out of the clouds and get indoors in quite a kind voice, and shut the door behind them. Liz cooked dinner; Claudia and Tom ate it, and conversed around her. Tom had clearly told Claudia to behave normally around Liz, no matter how worried she was.

 

That night she dreamt she was looking in a mirror, and in the glass a car approached. And when she panicked, and turned to see whether it was real, it wasn’t a car. It was Helen Cutter, smiling.


	26. Chapter 26

That dream, not unreasonably, occupied Liz’s thoughts for the rest of the weekend. Behind the anomalies, she had long since stopped worrying about whether Helen was coming after her or not; firstly, she had definitively rejected Helen’s service so was no longer any use to her, and secondly, she never stopped moving. She had now been in one place for a week, which felt like a really long time. She told Claudia and Tom a slightly edited version of the visit to the gravestone over breakfast on Sunday, leaving out all the more personal, fluffier bits of her feelings with relation to the visit, and travelling lightly over the bits where she had lied to Mr. Wallace. Liz mentioned Helen to Tom that evening, when she was absent-mindedly tweaking the steak on the grill and Claudia had gone into the living-room to take a phone call. She suspected that Claudia, if she knew Liz was concerned about Helen, would do the sensible and logical thing and cut down on her freedom even further, which would drive Liz up the wall – she had been so bored last week. Tom didn’t treat her like an ordinary seventeen-year-old; he behaved much as Captain Stringer did towards Ross Jenkins in her own timeline, relatively indulgent, but ready to come down on him like a ton of bricks the moment he took advantage and stuck a toe over the line.

 

“Are you worried?” Tom said evenly.

 

Liz tipped her head from side to side, grimacing, and started chopping tomatoes for salad. “I don’t know. I haven’t, like, _seen_ anything... and I don’t think there’s any way she could have followed me, except she knows that I would go straight for any modern anomaly. And I’ve been here a week.” She nearly cut herself on the kitchen knife, swore, and moved on. “It’s longer than I’ve been anywhere else. Except maybe Cardiff; we stayed there for ages. It’s just getting into a pattern, that worries me. Because I remember how easily she got me last time.”

 

Tom grunted. “We’re keeping an eye out.”

 

Liz nodded her thanks, emptied the tomatoes into a bowl full of salad greens, and dressed the salad. Claudia came back down into the kitchen, and Liz took the steak off the grill and they ate a relatively quiet supper, with only desultory conversation apart from an animated five minutes when Liz and Tom dissected the thriller Liz had taken onto the train (Claudia confined her literary adventures to the Booker Prize List and the works of Jane Austen). Liz hoped Claudia wasn’t worrying; she just didn’t feel very much like talking.

 

When Blade slipped her her knife and a belt sheath to put it in the next morning, she would have known who to thank even if he hadn’t said “the boss says you should have these.” The only real surprise was that he then added that if she wanted some pointers, she should ask him, but that was a genuine surprise that almost led her to drop her coffee cup. Tanya had told her a thing or two, Helen had demonstrated a few more and Liz had had the sense not to ignore them just because they came from Helen, but no-one had ever offered to teach her to use a knife – possibly because at home, everyone still thought of her as more or less a child. And seriously, this was _Blade_. He liked only a very small, carefully considered selection of people. She was flattered.

 

She thanked him, and said she’d take him up on the offer. It didn’t raise the smile she might have expected, only a serious nod, but Liz had gathered through the grapevine that Blade was single and that Lester had lost his PA to a sudden illness that took her off work and hadn’t yet found a replacement, although he was in the process of sifting through candidates’ applications. Liz wondered if the name Lorraine Wickes would feature, and was deep in a plot – one of several, which currently included finding a way to enquire about Jamie’s health and happiness without being beheaded, discovering the exact nature of Connor, Abby and Stephen’s relationship and its relevance to Abby’s burgeoning Thing with Adey, and getting Connor to direct his research to helping her find her way home – when the ADD alarm went off, and she almost jumped out of her skin. This was followed by a further jumping out of her skin, when Kermit grabbed her by the back of her shirt and towed her inexorably down the corridor.

 

She freed herself by the simple expedient of kicking him repeatedly on the shin, and demanded to know what was going on.

 

“Boss says you’re coming with us,” Kermit said, in congratulatory tones. The soldiers had been quite sympathetic at points last week, when Liz was clearly itching under the weight of constant supervision, and had forced her to play darts matches or help them clean kit to give her something to do that wasn’t hang around and wait.

 

Liz tripped and almost fell flat on her face. “What, really? Where?”  


“Yes, really, no clue,” Kermit said comprehensively, and she slid into the first black Jeep that presented itself, finding herself sandwiched between Tom and Ditzy with Kermit in the driving seat and Claudia in the front passenger seat, composedly tinkering with her Blackberry. She tossed Liz’s jacket and bag at her.

 

“You forgot these,” she said calmly.

 

“Where are we going?” Liz enquired, removing a waterproofed sleeve from her mouth and wriggling uncomfortably. Neither Tom nor Ditzy was small; in fact, both were broad-shouldered, very solidly built and clanking with weaponry. Liz did not have very much room.

 

“Ah – Sussex,” Claudia said, looking over her shoulder. “Anomaly in an industrial plant, at least according to Connor, and he is generally right. The accuracy has improved since you lent him the black box to play with.”  


“Good?” Liz said a bit faintly. “What do you want me to do?”

 

“Well, firstly we want you out of the ARC, so you stop prowling the place like a particularly hungry tiger,” Claudia remarked, making Liz blush, “and secondly, you know more about anomalies than anyone else here. Connor’s working on machines to control anomalies further, and he can take readings off them already, but your field experience in knowing how the anomalies themselves behave and what we can expect from any particular time period would be very useful.”

 

 Liz cheered up. She wasn’t just there for busy work, after all. She was a bit, but not entirely.

 

 

            When they reached the industrial plant, it was in a state that could either be politely described as ‘lockdown’, or accurately described as ‘controlled hysteria’. A wooden-faced guard on the gate kept them waiting ten minutes until Claudia finally managed to steamroller him with ominous references to the Home Office, the local Chief Constable, and the CEO of the company that owned the plant. It took Claudia very little time to establish that she really could get any or all of these dignitaries on the phone and make the guard’s life very difficult, and then they were away.

 

            Once they got inside, they found hysterical employees, a lot of little cheeping noises, and small monkeyish-type things with tails. The anomaly was stable, and opened onto a time period where Liz remembered nearly being trampled by a herd of small horsy creatures, and seeing another of the things Helen had called Andrewsarchus at a considerable distance, as well as the nastiest-looking parrot she’d ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on. She informed Stephen and Claudia of these variables, precipitating a lot of muttering about the Eocene and Claudia turning green about the gills at the thought of a giant bird destroying a major industrial plant, and then went to catch one of the small monkeyish things so Connor could work out what it was. She finally got one, thanks to a convenient corner and a well-timed lunge, and dragged it out from under a machine into the light of day by the tail and held it up. Her original diagnosis was correct: monkeyish, quite like a lemur, with a really long tail. It swung and chittered angrily in her grasp.

 

             “I think I’ve eaten one of these,” Liz said thoughtfully, trying to recall the meal in question. “It wasn’t bad, I don’t think, but a bit tough.”

 

            “Charming,” Stephen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s one of the original primates, you know.”

 

            “Godinotia,” Connor chipped in knowledgeably. “Or maybe Darwinius.”

 

            Liz slung it through the anomaly before it could bite her. “Just don’t tell Abby I was holding it by the tail, okay?”

 

            Stephen grinned and nodded, and they set about chasing the things down. They had a nasty bite, and were most inconveniently too small and nippy to easily tranquilise; it made for an energetic three hours with nets and bits of fruit for bait, hunting down every last monkey. Finally, Stephen called a halt, saying that they’d caught everything they were going to catch, and recommending the use of traps to deal with the remainder of the plant’s monkey problem. Fortunately, it really did just look as if someone’s escaped exotic pet had infested the plant – the primates just looked like lemurs, even if they technically weren’t. The anomaly had closed, anyway, so even if they did find any others it would just mean taking them back to the ARC. And there was a grumpy line of soldiers waiting for Ditzy to plaster over their bites, and a grumpy Ditzy trying to calculate whether he had enough tetanus and rabies vaccines to cater for the twelve people who had been bitten, including Abby, or if he could just send them to hospital.

 

            Liz smirked at the thought of their arrival in A & E. It would be nothing short of hilarious, in an improbable sitcom kind of way, particularly given that the ARC staff were apparently on first name terms with the nurses.

 

            “At least someone’s having fun,” Claudia remarked with asperity, sweeping past, currently entangled in attempts to get cage traps delivered to the plant.

 

            It was a mark of how much more comfortable Liz now was with this anomaly team that she only grinned at her.

 

 

            After that first anomaly, the floodgates opened: the ADD started to go off at intervals of almost exactly six hours, which puzzled the physicists and drove the team up the wall, but Liz enjoyed it. She liked being able to get outside in among the mud rather than simply kicking her heels in the ARC all day, she was resilient, hard to tire and capable of sleeping anywhere, she was impervious to poor weather conditions, and anomalies no longer inspired any nervousness in her. She was still only armed with a knife for the first few excursions, but then Abby stuffed a tranquiliser pistol into her hands, and – having proved herself both accurate and trustworthy – Liz was allowed to carry it regularly, and even, once or twice, to use the heavier rifle when Stephen or Abby was occupied. Connor complained, but Liz shut him up by the very simple expedient of telling him she’d seen a Spinosaurus, and then describing the encounter at length. The only bit of it which made her stumble was the mention of Helen, not just because it bothered her but also because hearing her name clearly upset or annoyed Stephen, whose stunningly pretty brand of angst generally became even angstier when it happened. But she could skate over that.

 

            She was definitely being looked after, in one sense. She wasn’t insulated from the anomalies in the slightest, and over that demented week she learned to look at dead bodies with more detachment than she had ever had when she was travelling alone, and constantly faced with the prospect of having to kill something herself.  But she was never completely alone, whether Kermit was refining on the driving lessons Jon had given her in her own timeline, or Abby was teaching her how to kick someone’s jaw up through their skull, or she was road-testing Connor’s latest attempt at a Remote Anomaly Investigation Device, or she was sitting on the floor in Claudia’s office writing reports on an office laptop and tripping up ministerial flunkies with her conveniently stretched-out legs. Someone was always keeping an eye on her, and that someone was usually armed, dangerous, or both. Liz didn’t actually mind much; she’d had time to acclimatise to being around people after being alone for so long, and being a pack animal she was happier with people about to interact with and watch out for. This watching had a totally different tone to the earlier watching, warmer, friendlier and less guarded – even Lyle didn’t seem to think of her as hostile any more. Anyway, it meant Tom was taking her anxieties about Helen seriously, even though Stephen casually let slip that Helen hadn’t been seen in their timeline for months, and that they’d only had brief glimpses of her since Nick Cutter’s untimely presumed death.

 

            Liz had wondered if that would present a problem. She gathered that there had been something between Claudia and Nick before his disappearance, and this rang true with what little she knew of Cutter – possibly the same Nick – in her own timeline, but Claudia and Tom seemed to have made their peace with whatever it was, and (although Liz wasn’t much of an expert) she thought they were very happy together. They were certainly sickeningly sweet, outside the confines of the office and proper behaviour, and once they’d got used to Liz’s presence. Liz smiled and said nothing and did the washing up, and only let herself think about Juliet when she was alone in her bed at night.

 

            Connor, being Connor, had leapt at the thought of being able to bring his mentor back. Stephen and Abby had responded more slowly, and equivocated more. Abby, who was significantly more hardened than she looked, clearly reserved judgement on whether Nick was alive, and if so, whether he was still the same man they had known. As for Stephen, Liz was pretty sure that he had once been in love with Nick, and had lost him for good, although probably not because of revelations about the affair. She thought that the Nick Cutter in this timeline had vanished before that particular skeleton in the closet could be let out to play, and she was certain Stephen didn’t know she knew about it. It was possible she was the only person present who did, except maybe Sir James – and Liz still hadn’t spoken to Sir James, and didn’t intend to ask him questions like that. It would raise too many questions about how she knew what she did, and Liz was aware that she was a little over-informed about the anomaly project for a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. She kept quiet.

 

            She did not expect her own secret skeleton to come out to play.


	27. Chapter 27

            They had been out at a particularly muddy anomaly, tracking a set of creature footprints through a bit of National Trust woodland, which finally fetched up back at the anomaly – the creature must have been only a few minutes ahead of them. Liz went through the anomaly to check where it was, followed by Blade, recognised it as being just like the Pleistocene, and retreated at such speed that she knocked both herself and Blade into the small stream the anomaly stood on the crumbling banks of. Both of them wound up sodden, especially because Liz fell underneath Blade and was flattened into the muddy bottom and nearly drowned. This inspired a certain amount of hilarity, and Liz was still giggling when she headed into the rec room, damp about the edges but a lot cleaner after a very necessary shower. She had her head turned, replying to Finn’s jokes at her expense, and completely ignored Captain Stringer’s warning looks and Adey trying to catch up with her and tell her about something. She had no idea the boy in the rec room was there until she walked straight into him and bounced off.

 

            Her head turned sharply, and she staggered – only partly because she was knocked off balance.

 

            “I’m sorry,” the boy said; he had a pleasant voice, which had broken at some point in the recent past, and a nice smile.

 

            “That’s fine,” Liz said automatically, reeling mentally, and trusting to luck to make sure it wasn’t showing on her face. She found a smile, and confidently held out a hand to shake. She had to _know_. “Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met before?”

 

            “No,” the boy agreed, although he was looking at her a little strangely, and shook hands. “Jamie Burke-Lester. Pleased to meet you.”

 

            Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God. It _was_ him.

 

            He was, of course, a couple of years older than her Jamie had ever been; older than her Jamie would ever be. He’d be fifteen now, she calculated quickly, and the difference showed. He was taller and broader across the shoulders, although part of the increased muscle tone and bulk was the fact that this Jamie had a chance to live healthily for much longer. She would not have been able to carry him anywhere, not in her arms. His black hair was thick and long, falling messily into his eyes; chemotherapy hadn’t rid him of his eyebrows, and his eyelashes were as long as she remembered from the brief periods of time when her Jamie had been well. His skin was not so pale, his mouth looked more used to smiling, and his eyes were bright with something truer than fever. He was dressed in school uniform.

 

            “Likewise,” Liz said, hanging onto his grip a little more tightly than necessary, knowing he would realise her hands were trembling if she didn’t. “I’m Lisa, by the way. You’d be Sir James’ son?”

 

            He nodded, and grinned sheepishly. “I know we don’t look much alike.”

 

            “You do,” Liz said, knee-jerk, as she wandered over to the coffee machine. Jamie had always looked more like his mother than his father, the resemblance even more marked than in Liz, and Liz had always looked for ways in which he was like their father, other than the artist’s hands. “I mean – something about the expressions.” She dredged up another pale smile. “Sorry, you _really_ remind me of someone. You don’t know a Liam Taunton, do you?”

 

            She sacrificed Liam, one of her closer friends at school, without a second thought. It wasn’t as if he’d ever find out.

 

            Jamie smiled and shook his head.  “Funny. I was thinking, you remind me of someone.”

 

            Liz forced herself to be calm, forced herself to keep her voice light; inside, she was screaming. “Yeah, I have got one of those faces.”

 

            Jamie jumped up onto the table and sat there, feet swinging and engaging smile firmly stuck on his face. She could hear absolute silence from everyone else in the room and cursed them; they would give her away. “It was only for a second, I know you couldn’t have been her.”

 

            “You’ve got me curious now.”

 

            Jamie ran a hand through his hair. “It was my sister, actually.”

 

            Liz spilt boiling water on her hand and didn’t utter the slightest cry. Jamie’s words hurt more. “I didn’t know Sir James had a daughter.”

 

            “She – um, she got hit by a car a couple of years ago. So you wouldn’t – it’s not like she’s around, or anything.”

 

            “Oh my God,” Liz said, and had no trouble whatsoever sounding distressed. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.” She paused, and put slight incredulity into her voice, hoping that the woodenness of her face would pass for her trying to stifle her disbelief in the name of manners. “You thought I looked like her?”

 

            “It’s stupid.” Jamie was blushing. “It was just something about your eyes for a second. Sorry,” he added awkwardly.

 

            “That’s fine,” Liz said easily, waving it away. She felt like her heart was fucking _breaking_ , splitting slowly and torturously in two over a fault line she had thought quiescent, and it hurt, God, it hurt so much.

 

            There was a short pause. The others seemed to be playing darts, and Claudia and Stephen were having one of their quiet arguments – by which means nearly every dilemma facing the anomaly project was solved, and which never seemed to result in a fit of the sulks or any pronounced resentment – over Claudia’s Blackberry. Liz felt the back of her neck prickle, though, and knew they were watching her.

 

            “How come you’re here?” Liz asked, gulping at her boiling coffee. “Aren’t you meant to be in school?”

 

            “Oh, school ended a couple of hours ago,” Jamie said. (Liz realised, with a start, that it was half-past five.) “And I – well, I left my keys at home. Dad told me to come here. There’s no-one in the flat to let me in, and Mum’s in Brussels.”

 

            “Oh, right,” Liz said, as if enlightened. _Dad told me to come here_ , she repeated to herself, stunned. Sir James couldn’t have done it on purpose. He couldn’t have meant to – to _test_ her – to use Jamie’s unexpected absence to find out if she was really who she said she was.

 

            He wouldn’t have done that, would he? She felt dizzy and sick and there was a faint roaring in her ears that she couldn’t seem to shake.

 

            Abby had left the room at some point. Liz hadn’t seen it happen. Now she returned, bringing Lyle with her. He looked professionally impassive, but Liz had known Jon very well, and she registered the expression as ‘appalled’.

 

            “Jamie, mate, your dad’s looking for you.”

 

            “Crap,” Jamie said, bouncing off the table, and shot Liz a charming smile. He’d been an enchanting child, she remembered; he was a good-looking teenager. If her Jamie had lived as long he would have been beating the girls off with a stick. “I don’t think I’m meant to be down here. Jon, am I in trouble?”  


            Lyle grinned. “Not if you get your lazy arse upstairs now.”

 

            Jamie left, throwing a remark over his shoulder to the effect that it had been nice to meet Liz. She raised a smile for him, and vanished into her coffee. She waited in silence until Jamie and Lyle’s footsteps had gone away, her eyes closed, and then set the coffee mug down carefully, before she could drop it.

 

            “Is he gone?” she said, and her voice cracked on the first attempt.

 

            “He’s gone,” Claudia confirmed gently, and Liz realised Claudia was close by from the sound of her voice, which was only just filtering through the increasingly loud roaring in her ears. She flinched instinctively away from an outstretched hand.

 

            “Which way did he go?” Her voice was definitely breaking as she spoke.

 

            “Right,” Claudia said, as if not sure it was relevant. “Towards the drum. Lisa-”

 

            “Okay. Good. Thanks.” Liz drew a ragged breath. “Just – give me a minute.”

 

She blundered out of the rec room and turned left, heading blindly into the depths of the ARC. Her eyes were now open; it was because she was crying that she could not see.

 

***

 

Claudia was firmly of the opinion that Sir James Lester was a great man, whether he knew it or not. She was now also firmly of the opinion that he was an utter bloody fool, and she was going to shout at him for the good of his soul. Fortunately, Lyle had taken Jamie home; she wasn’t sure her nerves would have stood Jamie’s continued presence in the same building as Liz, and she was very sure they would not have stood the pressure of trying to scream at James without letting his son hear.

 

The look on Liz’s face when Jamie had left the room and the shutters had come down had been terrible; Claudia had no words to describe the depth of pain and grief on the girl’s face, or the numb misery in her voice. Liz was obviously a more accomplished liar than any of them had realised, because she’d hidden her distress well, with only a few minor flickers and twitches to give her away, most of them around Jamie’s shy comment that something about Liz’s eyes reminded him of his sister (which – what had _possessed_ the boy? But Claudia knew Jamie a little, and knew that he was prone to seeing fragments of his sister in other people). And then Jamie had left, and the walls had come crumbling down, and Liz had shattered into a million small pieces. Claudia had had Abby follow her at a distance, to see where she went, and when Abby came back with the announcement that Liz had found one of the empty offices to cry in and that she, Abby Maitland, was not prepared to stay and listen to it any longer, Claudia had gone down to see for herself.

 

She was not surprised Abby had bottled out; she herself hadn’t dared to open the door and see what was happening, had only listened hopelessly at the door to the soft, regular sobbing. She had never seen or heard Liz cry, even though she had now been trapped away from her family for several months and in this timeline for nearly three weeks, and even though she had come downstairs to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water and had several times found Liz wide-eyed and wakeful, her hands wrapped around a cup of chamomile tea. Tom said that when prodded gently (although Claudia had the greatest suspicions of his idea of ‘gentle’) she had admitted to occasional nightmares and claimed they did her no particular harm. Perhaps it stood to reason that when Liz broke, she broke spectacularly.

 

Claudia stood in her employer’s office, and noted, with rage, that he would not meet her eyes. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” she said, and the suppressed venom in her voice even took her by surprise.

 

“None of your business, Miss Brown,” Lester retorted, but she could see how tired and pained he looked. It was odd that that didn’t make her feel more kindly towards him, but she could hear Liz’s misery ringing in her ears.

 

“Oh, it _is_ my business,” Claudia said, planting her fists firmly on Lester’s desk and leaning forwards. “Because that child lives in my house and eats my food, and I mean to look after her. ‘She’s crying, James, she’s downstairs crying as if her heart is broken, and _you had better have a bloody good reason for what you’ve done_.”

 

There was a long silence.

 

“I had to know,” Lester said softly, a pen flipping meaninglessly in his fingers. “If she was really who she said she was. Confronting her with Jamie – I thought it would be proof one way or another.”

 

“Proof,” Claudia repeated, stunned. “ _Proof_. You didn’t think you knew enough about her to trust her? _What_?”

 

“Think about it, Claudia!” Lester got up and paced. “She appears through an anomaly, claiming to be my daughter, except that I buried my Liz years ago. Lisa’s resemblance to her is superficial only, but it’s there. If she’s telling the truth, I have a responsibility to her – and if not, I have a responsibility to myself and to the project to find out. What if she’s still working for Helen? We don’t know she travelled alone for any appreciable length of time; we only have her word.”

 

Claudia sank into an office chair and stared at him. “James. Lisa wouldn’t dream of claiming to be _your_ daughter. She claims to be the daughter of a version of you in a different timeline, and she insists on the distinction more than anyone else does. And at this point, frankly, I think she would rather go back to Helen than take anything from you, and she _hates_ Helen, she’s so scared of having to go back to her – you don’t know her at all, you have no idea... James, you can’t pretend to ignore her for the best part of a month – and she _knows_ you’re watching her, by the way – and then try to _test_ her like that! James, she told you her brother died in her arms. What possessed you to shove his doppelganger under her nose?”

 

Lester said nothing, as well he might.

 

Claudia got up, and invaded his personal space, nose to nose with him, arms folded and eyes snapping with fury. “In future, leave Lisa to me and Tom. Because you know nothing about her. And if she has to become anyone’s responsibility rather than her own, she can be ours – we want her and you don’t. Confine yourself to thinking about how we’re going to lay a paper trail for her if she has to stay in this timeline, and keep your son out of her way.”

 

She started to stamp out, and paused on the threshold. “Wait. One more thing.”

 

“ _What_ , Miss Brown?” Lester sounded weary.

 

“You should see what you’ve done.”

 

 

Sir James went down to the empty office Liz was hiding in, on the grounds that otherwise, it was more than likely that Claudia would grab his ear and drag him – and he really didn’t need further injuries to his professional reputation. He could see which room it must be as soon as they entered the quiet, slightly dusty and sterile corridor, the door slightly ajar, although the office itself was in darkness with no sliver of light escaping into the corridor. He could also hear that it must be that one: there was a faint noise as if of stifled tears on the air, although he had to strain his ears to hear it, and he almost wondered if he had imagined it, because it stopped abruptly as he approached.

 

Claudia’s outraged glower was still burning into his back, but Claudia thought it wasn’t that that made him stop dead only a foot or two from the door, his hand outstretched to the handle. It was the sudden whisper of “Dad? Is that you?”, soft and incredulous.

 

Sir James knocked the door by accident, surprised, and it swung open a few more inches.

 

“Oh. No,” the girl he had come to know as Lisa Lewis said, with an ominous wobble in her voice – much clearer and audibly down to earth than it had been when she was asking for her father – and buried her tear-stained face in her hands.

 

“Now do you see?” Claudia said, voice still full of anger.

 

Sir James would not have been remotely surprised if she’d told him to go away and think about what he’d done. “I see,” he said, feeling old. “I’m sorry, Claudia. I didn’t realise.”

 

“You didn’t _think_ ,” Claudia hissed furiously, and swept past him. “And it’s not _me_ you owe the apology to.”

 

She brushed through the door, and went down on her knees beside the girl. Sir James retreated a step or two, and then walked away, back up to his office.

 

Claudia heard him go and wasn’t remotely sorry. She reached out and stroked Liz’s hair gently. “Lisa...”

 

“I thought I was dreaming,” Liz said, her voice cracked and wobbling. “I thought I dreamed Jamie was alive, and I woke up and I was home and he was dead again. Do I have to choose?”

 

 Do I have to choose between my brother’s life and my own? The unspoken words rang in Claudia’s ears. She wrapped her arms around ‘Lisa’ – whose true identity no-one at the ARC would ever dare to dispute again, if Claudia had her way – and rocked her gently, murmuring nonsense. She had no answers for the girl, and didn’t think the question was a serious one anyway. Liz had been crying for a good hour or so. She was emotionally exhausted and desperately in need of food and remedial coffee; Claudia wasn’t going to hold her desperate rhetorical questions against her, even if she had no plans to answer them.

 

Because maybe Liz wouldn’t have to choose. Maybe the choice had been made for her. Maybe there would never be another anomaly open to her home timeline again.

 

Maybe there was no longer any Liz Lester. Only Lisa Lewis.


	28. Chapter 28

Something indefinable had changed. Liz spoke and smiled and laughed less, and she actively avoided anyone she had known very well in their other incarnation in her old timeline, which in practice amounted to keeping well out of the way of Sir James, Lyle, Ditzy and Finn. Blade and Kermit escaped, but only because Liz had known Kermit mostly through Cara and because the Blade in her timeline would never have considered teaching her to use a knife; he was perceptibly different, without Lorraine’s influence. Lacey fortunately didn’t seem to be assigned to the anomaly project – at least, not right now.

 

Tom took her out onto the range, and tested her with a variety of guns, some much too heavy for her still badly torn shoulder and lost muscle tone to support, until her hands were shaking with recoil; after that, he gave her a handgun to take into the field. Liz always thought twice before firing it – she couldn’t forget Helen putting a gun into her hands – and she preferred knives because she was better with them, but she was useful, and improved as time went on.

 

The weather got colder. Claudia found Liz an old Barbour and a pair of thick gloves to wear out to anomalies, and Liz started to wear the beanie her anonymous benefactor had given her months before.

 

Christmas approached, Advent calendars appearing in the ARC as December opened, and Liz’s spirits took another downturn; she didn’t want to spend Christmas away from her family. She made an effort to join in, helping Adey and Kermit string Christmas lights all over the place, and glueing together several feet of paper chain when Abby commanded her to help. But neither Claudia nor Tom failed to notice her withdrawal into a world she could mark out for herself, away from everything she considered familiar, or the way she visited Connor regularly to see what progress he was making. His work on the black box was proceeding apace; he’d now managed to recreate it, and he was working on ways to hook it up to the main ADD. Liz would hover silently around his chair, listening to him talk, eyes fixed on the ADD’s main screens as if they were her way out.

 

Tom warned his grandmother to expect a third guest for Christmas. Liz came to work the next day with a lip that hadn’t just been bitten, but almost bitten through.

 

            Liz was, in fact, silently miserable, and Claudia thought she could have borne it much better if Liz had been able to cry and let the poison of whatever was upsetting her boil out. As it was, Liz spoke in monosyllables and confined herself to solitary pursuits as much as possible. Claudia was on the verge of losing her temper again with her boss, who didn’t seem to understand the havoc he’d wrought, and who had fixated on the point that the girl wasn’t his daughter. Claudia found it extremely easy to blame him for his behaviour, but there didn’t seem to be anything much she could do about it, except try to shield Liz. And Liz was very difficult to shield.

 

            Privately, Captain Becker – the latest hire to the ARC, toffee-nosed but funny in a dry, sarcastic kind of way, and who endeared himself to Claudia by making it his business to chivvy Liz out of a Blade-esque ominous silence whenever he got the chance, Stephen by rescuing Connor from several sticky situations Connor hadn’t noticed until he was removed from them, and Tom by being an excellent shot – asked for a word with Tom shortly before he took a team up to North Wales to investigate persistent, probably groundless media reports of a dragon. He pointed out that although ‘Lisa’ took no more risks than any of the more sensible soldiers did, she took an awful lot more than a civilian researcher should do. And although Captain Becker said he reserved judgement on her mental state, it was plain that, while ‘Lisa’ wasn’t courting death, she might not mind too much if it came knocking. He said he would prefer not to have her in the field. Tom said it was tempting, but her presence was unavoidable – and at least she didn’t have too many scruples about shooting things that were trying to eat her, unlike most of the scientists.

 

            Claudia confronted Liz a week into December, but found that Liz would only tell her that she missed home. She was polite, but she wouldn’t elaborate. And although she reminded calm, capable of holding a sensible conversation and outwardly reasonable, Claudia couldn’t help worrying.

 

 

            In many ways, the anomaly that emptied the ARC two weeks before Christmas Day came as something of a relief. Connor had been playing Christmas music over the tannoy, driving Sir James demented for the ten and a half minutes he tolerated it, and had then progressed to playing it in the rec room, which had driven Liz into the gym, flinging rude observations on Connor’s musical tastes behind her which had made Abby bristle slightly and Stephen call on Liz to relax. The last injunction was received with more tractability than might reasonably have been expected, only getting Stephen a sardonic look thrown over Liz’s shoulder, but nonetheless it did nothing to improve the atmosphere. Adey and Abby were in the process of a falling out, Claudia was suffering from the ramifications of a very pointed request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, and everyone was desperately looking forward to a Christmas holiday, except for those who were in a dreadful temper because they weren’t getting one. Liz was far from the only one feeling rather cross or upset, and the anomaly provided a useful change of subject and something that wasn’t their collective bad mood to focus on. There was a certain amount of speculation as to what the anomaly, which was apparently in a warehouse, could possibly contain, and the usual bets were laid. Connor, who had evidently not yet recovered from the lowest form of Liz’s biting wit, suggested gloomily that it would be one of those ones where they all stood around waiting for something to happen for hours, and Stephen tried to cheer him up by suggesting that it might be a T. rex, eliciting a collective groan from the soldiers, who all thought that T. rexes should be faced with nothing more nor less than a tank or six with air support and possibly the odd tactical nuke. The buggers had a horrible habit of getting up and trying to take your head off just when you thought you’d finally done for them.

 

            The anomaly in a warehouse was actually an anomaly in one of several warehouses, set on waste ground behind chain-link fences topped with coils of razor wire. The padlock and chain holding the gates closed were rusty, and they couldn’t raise the security guard, so they shattered the chain and wrenched the gates open, leaving Claudia outside with a couple of men to watch her, making calls to the local police and any of her contacts who might be able to find out who the warehouse belonged to. There were signs advertising vicious dogs and an electric fence, but only one of these was apparent. The low humming as Liz passed the fence made it clear that it was in working order, but there was no sign at all of the dogs. Liz supposed that they were either dead or simply not present. The same applied to the security guard.

 

            Liz glanced around her, looking for trouble, and found to her unease that Lyle was itching his thumbs, the skin already red. Thoughtfully, she loosened her knife in its sheath, and took up a position next to Connor, who was fiddling with a hand-held anomaly detector.

 

            “That one,” he said authoritatively, pointing at the one on the far left.

 

            They made for it carefully, all feeling rather on edge, and found themselves at the big front door, which appeared to consist of a metal shutter, probably opened and closed with a remote.

 

            “There’s got to be another way in,” Captain Becker said practically, and sent off four men to find it, led by Lieutenant Lyle.

 

            The back of Liz’s neck was prickling. Something was bothering her, something she couldn’t remember, and she didn’t understand _why_ it was bothering her... She could hear something, something that wasn’t right, could feel it pressing at her, a persistent itch of wrongness. She frowned thunderously, double-checked her handgun, and looked around for whatever it was, knowing from bitter experience that if it bothered her now then ignoring it could only lead to extreme exasperation or mortal danger.

 

            “Dripping tap?” she said out loud, in total confusion, and the radio clipped onto her belt sneezed its way into static-filled life.

 

            “...found a way in... door... much less... left...” Lyle’s voice crackled. The reception was shit, which was only to be expected, considering the anomaly.

 

            Liz drew her handgun. “Something is not fucking right,” she said softly, and got a cursory glance from Captain Becker, who ordered Lyle to investigate.

 

            Liz looked round and saw a sort of cement cupboard, tucked to one side of the warehouse, with a low, sloping roof, steel doors and an _electricity, danger_ sign. The dripping sound was coming from behind it or close to it, she was sure; there was nowhere else it could be. Her lips shaped the words _a collection of anomaly-filled garden sheds_ , and she headed for it. There had been a home base marked on Helen’s OS map in this area. She had never had occasion to visit it...

 

            Captain Becker grabbed her by the scarf before she could get past him. “What the fuck are you doing, Lisa?”

 

            “I think this is about Helen,” Liz said. “I don’t know. It might be. I don’t know.” She looked him in the eye, knowing that everyone had gone tense at the sound of Helen’s name. “Trust me. If I’m right, they’ve just walked into a warehouse full of Helen’s supplies.”

 

            “Fuck,” Stephen breathed.

 

            “Go with her,” Captain Becker ordered a man she didn’t know well, Barratt, and got on the radio to tell Lyle to proceed with extreme caution because Helen Fucking Cutter might be lurking behind the next cargo container.

 

            Barratt shadowed Liz to the electricity cupboard, and then they edged round it. There was certainly a tap, and it was certainly dripping. It couldn’t account for the large splash stain of water, which looked more as if someone had dropped an open bottle of water. The latter also explained the half a generic size 10 boot print, fading slowly away on the concrete that sloped down to a drain.

 

            It could be a coincidence. It definitely wasn’t.

 

            Liz picked up her radio and pressed transmit, careless of what else might be going on. “Clones were here. With or without Helen. I’m almost sure.” Then she turned it to receive, turned the volume right down, and hooked it back onto her belt. “Left, Lyle said?” she said quietly to Barratt. “We’ll get there faster if we go round the back.”

 

            “I definitely don’t think Captain Becker had that in mind when he told me to go with you.”

 

            “So?” Liz said. “I’m going. You can follow me, or you can go back.”

 

            “ _We_ are going back.”

 

            Barratt definitely didn’t know her at all. “Wrong,” Liz said, and set off running low and quiet around the back. She heard Barratt swear and say something unflattering into his radio headset, and ignored him.

 

            She was at the door Lyle had mentioned in a matter of moments, Barratt crashing to an almost-silent halt behind her a second later. “Lewis! Lisa! What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Captain Becker says come back in _now_ –”

 

            The door was slightly ajar, and Liz knew, the same way she knew her own name, that there were clones inside and that they were in a position to have prepared an ambush for the four men who had gone in not expecting people with automatic weapons. She just looked at Barratt, and slipped into the warehouse. It had been a long time since she had thought of her Jon and Lyle as the same person, but either way, she wasn’t prepared to let the clones get him – and she knew that bad things happened to men Helen Cutter got her paws on. Worse things than had happened to her.

 

            Barratt swore and made a grab for her, but Liz was way ahead of him, flitting into the semi-darkness of the cargo containers. She darted into a tiny gap between one of these and the wall, and waited until her eyes acclimatised to the light, clicking the safety catch off her gun as she did so.

 

            There was still silence. Liz could hear almost nothing, but that didn’t mean anything. The gap she was hiding in ran along the warehouse from end to end, and was less open and exposed than the rest of the passageways, so slowly and silently she started to make her way along it.

 

            As she moved stealthily forward, eyes scanning the area around her and above her in case the clones had learnt the value of climbing, she realised that the warehouse was only partially full, and illogically arranged – the cargo containers were positioned towards the front metal shutter, even though the place was only about two-thirds full. The walls of the warehouse were metallic rather than rough brick or concrete, as Liz discovered by brushing her fingers against it; probably the only reason the anomaly had showed up on the detector was a door being left open. That argued strongly against Helen’s presence; she would not have made such a mistake. Liz felt a strong, and totally unjustified, sense of relief.

 

            Liz had entered the warehouse about a third of the way up, and was now almost up to the other end; she could see a faint light which she had a horrible suspicion belonged to an anomaly. Lyle and the men had evidently decided to clear the entire place from one end to the other, feeling that anything might be hiding in the shadows, and had not started at the anomaly end; she caught sight of their torch beams just as she was disappearing behind the last bank of cargo containers before clear ground, which was fortunate. She would not have wanted to accidentally alert the clones to her presence so abruptly; it would, to say the least, have been inconvenient, and would have made them all sitting ducks, rather than just Lyle and his men. She sneaked forward a little faster, and finally found herself at the edge of the last cargo container.

 

            Liz had to chew on her bitten lip to prevent herself exclaiming aloud. The anomaly was certainly there, gleaming bright and strong; so were six clones, all armed with automatic rifles. Packing cases were piled up against the walls, giving Liz extra cover, but limiting her view of the scene past them. She recognised the amenities from Helen’s other home bases; it was all pretty standard, except perhaps for the large plastic water containers. They must have been filling one when the noise of the Jeeps and the anomaly project breaking in told them they were under attack.

 

            She didn’t even have a second to think in. Lyle and his men would be level with the clones in moments; she didn’t have a proper radio headset and couldn’t warn them without alerting the clones. But they didn’t know the clones were there, and that could mean the death of them. Liz was not prepared to risk that.

 

            She shoved all other thoughts out of her mind and lifted her gun, aiming as carefully as she could in the time. The clones were pressed against the cargo containers, intent on the approaching soldiers rather than any suspicious twitches of movement in the shadows. She couldn’t miss, really. And even if she did, it would only tell Lyle what he needed to know: that there was trouble, and it was armed.

 

            She fired, and did not stop to see that her shot had connected before skittering deeper behind the cargo containers. The semi-darkness erupted with yells and automatic fire, a lot of it aimed at her hiding place for the first few seconds until Lyle and company made it plain that they were the greater threat, and then Liz crept back to her place to see what was going on.

 

            After the first ambush, which Liz had wrecked, Lyle and his men had had it all their way. The clones were shocked by the single gunshot from nowhere and its effect on their fellows (Liz couldn’t yet see if she’d killed, or just injured, the clone she had shot at) and their tactics were almost nonexistent if Helen wasn’t there to direct them. They were able to give very little resistance, and five of them were dead. The last one backed up to the anomaly, and then suddenly, improbably, it glanced into the shadows behind the now-shredded packing cases and charged, a snarl of hatred on its face.

 

            Liz closed her finger on the trigger and fired three shots. They were unnecessary, though she saw them hit its chest – the clone was almost torn to pieces by the fire from Lyle’s men, who probably thought the clone had gone mad, trying to take off into the shadows when there was a perfectly viable escape route behind it. Still, the clone staggered to a halt and fell flat on its face, blood going everywhere.

 

            Not that there was any particular shortage of the stuff. Liz fought to keep her breathing under control.

 

            “Who’s there? Lisa?” Lyle called, voice loud and sharp.

 

            “Yes,” she said, with a disgraceful crack in her voice. “It’s me. I’m coming out, don’t shoot.”

 

            She slipped through the gap between the packing cases and the cargo containers, and walked out into the light afforded by the serenely spinning anomaly, up to Lyle, who was looking at her with a very odd cocktail of an expression. Exasperation, anger, anxiety, and a grudging respect all played a part. She put the safety catch on her gun, and holstered it before she could do any further damage.

 

            “What the hell did you do that for?” Lyle said quite kindly. There was a faint, urgent crackling on their radios; Blade had turned away, answering it as best as he could, considering the anomaly.

 

            She swallowed. She could hear the rest of the anomaly project’s soldiers approaching at a run, and knew she was about to be in shitloads of trouble. “The first shot?”

 

            “Start with leaving the group.”

 

            “I knew there were clones,” she said simply, stomach roiling. Several of her shots had definitely connected; the clone lying by the place where they had proposed to ambush Lyle’s men, arms flung out, was probably one of hers. “I saw their bootprints. I know what they look like by now. I would have warned you over the radio, but it would have told them I was here, and...” She gestured at the last clone to die. “They hate me. They hate me more than any of Helen’s enemies, that I know of.” She shook her head. “I didn’t want you to die. I didn’t want Helen to get you.” She hiccupped oddly.

 

            “You’re going to be sick,” Lyle observed, and held her scarf back while she was, in fact, violently ill all over the warehouse’s concrete floor. “What makes you think Helen would have got us?”

 

            Liz wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and stared at the floor, bile bitter in her mouth. “She got me, didn’t she?”

 

            There was a short pause. In the background, Finn stuck his head through the anomaly, withdrew it, and announced that if there was anything on the other side it knew what was good for it, because it had fucked off out of their way.

 

            “If she gets you through one anomaly,” Liz said, trying to keep her voice even. “You’re lost. Trust me. I know.”

           

            “Don’t count on it, Lewis,” Lyle said. “The boy wonder may yet manage to find you a way out. I’ve never known him to fuck up anything he wanted to do beyond the point of all repair, and he really, really wants to find you a way home.”

 

            “I hope he’s as good as everyone says he is,” Liz murmured to her boots. She had trod in something unidentifiable. She was pleased that it was unidentifiable; she did not want to know what it was.

 

            “He is,” Lyle said quite confidently, and clapped her on the back. “You didn’t do badly, Lewis. I’ve known people do better, but you didn’t do badly at all. And we’re all alive. That’s the main thing.” He cleared his throat. “Come on. Let’s get you outside into the light of day before Miss Brown kills us all for letting you get your feet wet.”

 

            Liz spluttered, feeling – justifiably – that her feet had been sodden before she’d ever reached this timeline, and Lyle just laughed and dragged her away.

 

            She’d killed at least two clones now, or perhaps three or more, if you counted the one she had forced backwards into a closing anomaly at knifepoint. She still felt queasy, although there was nothing left in her stomach, and she certainly wouldn’t be forgetting the look on that last clone’s face any time soon, but at bottom, she was confident she had acted in self-defence, and that she had had no other choice. She thought she was okay with what she’d done. She hoped that conviction would last.


	29. Chapter 29

            Connor soldered some wire neatly into place, burnt his finger, cursed a bit and waved his hand around, and then screwed the panel back on. He abruptly became aware that someone was standing behind him watching him, scrambled to his feet, banged his head on the trolley of equipment he’d started to keep after his electronics kit had begun spewing out of the electrician’s box he’d previously kept it in, and sat down on the floor again. Strong brown hands with bruised knuckles and a few very incongruous paper cuts moved the trolley and hauled him off the floor.

 

            “All right, Connor?” the young woman he called Lisa said pleasantly.

 

            “Yeah, yeah, fine,” Connor babbled, and reminded himself not to call her Liz, even in conversation with her and no-one else. Claudia would be annoyed with him, and Sir James would be sarcastic again, and he couldn’t spend all his life hiding behind Stephen, even if Stephen did have a great way of kissing the wounds to his ego better. It wasn’t really his fault. He hadn’t been told that she was now to be called Lisa until a day after it had been decided, and by that point she was firmly fixed in his mind as Liz.

 

            Connor didn’t think the name Lisa suited her. It was just that bit too soft and nice, and Liz – while nice, in her own way – wasn’t soft at all. She looked two or three years older than her real age, and distinctively unfeminine; she was always neat and tidy but gave off the strong impression of caring more about being able to hit the bulls-eye with a thrown knife at fifty paces than the state of her eyeliner. Connor had never seen her smartly dressed, and had often seen people mistake her for a boy until she opened her mouth and spoke. The layers she was wearing – jeans, boots, heavy jumpers, a borrowed Barbour jacket – and the fact that she hadn’t had a chance to eat regularly when she was travelling around erased her figure. She looked moderately more civilised now that she had a chance to wash whenever she needed to, and less battered now that she had access to a medic, but there was still a faint air of knowing about and being comfortable with dangers that Connor couldn’t begin to understand, and, frankly, didn’t want to.

 

            Even if watching her and Abby spar was – well. Even Stephen thought that was pretty fucking hot, and Stephen mostly avoided women like the plague.

 

            Connor cleared his throat, and leaned protectively against the black plastic and steel of the ADD. “Busy day?”

 

            Lisa displayed her paper cuts. “Paperwork day. Claudia wanted everything in triplicate and Becker broke the photocopier.”

 

            “I’m not fixing it,” Connor said pre-emptively. “I’ve only just finished with the ADD and I have that massive program still running on the computer downstairs –”

 

            “I know, I know.” Lisa grinned. “I went down there first to look for you. The signs are very impressive.”

 

            Connor blushed, thinking of his cupboard of an office, the only distinguishing features of which were the extreme clutter, the workbench, the giant safe Claudia insisted he lock all the odder things into every evening and which the soldiers had had to break into three separate times because Connor kept forgetting the purposely random combination he’d been given, and the large scrawled signs all over the computer threatening terrible fates to anyone who touched it. “The cleaners turn it off if I don’t.”

 

            “They’re very keen on eco-friendliness.” Lisa stripped off the heaviest of her jackets and draped it over the back of his computer chair. “What are you working on in there?”

 

            Connor hesitated. “It’s... I’m looking for patterns in the anomaly data we’ve got. Correlations. Where are most of them found, how strong are they on average, what times do they lead to, how long do they last... It’s things like, I’ve noticed that anomalies to historical times don’t last so long, usually? But I need to back that up with evidence. And data. I don’t know why I haven’t done it before.”

 

            Lisa’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow. That would be a lot of stuff.”

 

            “Yeah, it kind of is.” Connor cleared his throat. “So. Where are you off to?”

 

            “Forest of Dean for a few days,” Lisa said absent-mindedly. That explained the coat: there was no reason to be so heavily dressed in the ARC, even in December, even when Lester said so many rude things about the wimpishness of his staff, that they insisted on having the heating up so high.  “Tom’s due a shift down there, and Claudia says we may as well all go, because she has some stuff she needs to deal with and Tom’s grandmother lives in Herefordshire, and that’s where we’re going for Christmas.”

 

            She seemed quite docile at the moment, definitely way calmer than she had been a couple of weeks ago, even though what appeared to have relaxed her was killing a bunch of people, which frankly creeped him out. Connor eyed her, and then asked a question he’d wanted to for some time, but hadn’t dared to, on the grounds that he was sure the answer would be violent. “Um. Are Ryan and Miss Brown adopting you or something?”  


            Lisa’s eyes shot to his; she’d been watching the ADD’s blue screens vaguely as they cycled through the screensavers that showed when they were actively looking for anomalies, but hadn’t yet registered anything. It had been quiet today. “No. I’ve got parents.”

 

            “Oh, of course, okay,” Connor said, back-pedalling at speed. “I just wondered. I mean, I think I can find you a way home, no question, but it might, um. Take some time.”

 

            “I know that,” Lisa said, a shadow falling over her face.

 

            Connor tried to think of something to say. As usual, what he found did not meet his criteria for making sense, let alone Miss Brown’s for being discreet. “I’m sorry, Liz. Fuck! I meant Lisa!”

 

            She burst out laughing, probably at the look of horror on his face. “Doesn’t matter, I know what you meant. And it’s not as if people don’t know, anyway.”

 

            “They do?” Connor squeaked, foreseeing a lecture of epic proportions from Miss Brown. He’d already had one of those in the last week; she’d found him surfing cryptozoology sites and complaining to Abby that if he could just sign up and talk about what he knew he could really put the cat among the pigeons, because they were wrong, wrong, _wrong_ about almost everything, except for that one guy who thought the Beast of Bodmin Moor was a black Labrador. Connor couldn’t speak for any other Beasts of Bodmin Moor that might happen to exist, but the one they’d spent a whole damp October day tracking in circles was definitely a dog. They had eventually found Blackie and returned him to his delighted owners, but Connor had felt more than a little aggrieved; he’d been expecting a panther at the very least.  

 

            Liz – Lisa! – nodded. “It gets about. Claudia and Tom are the only ones who don’t sometimes call me Liz by accident.” She shrugged. “I don’t mind.” She swayed onto her own two feet, rather than leaning all over his precious ADD. “Well, unless there’s a disaster in the Forest of Dean –”

 

            “Don’t say that!” Connor squawked, having experienced far too many disasters in the Forest of Dean.

 

            Lisa grinned callously and carried on. “Unless there’s a disaster in the Forest of Dean, I won’t be seeing you before Christmas. So have a great holiday, Connor.”

 

            “You too,” Connor said, and then remembered something important, something he’d meant to say before. “Lisa! Wait!”

 

            Lisa stopped in the doorway. “Yeah?”

 

            “I’ve been working on something,” Connor began slowly, fidgeting, “like – in my free time.”

 

            Lisa frowned. “You mean your computer program?”

 

            He shook his head. “That mostly runs without me. It just needs time. No, this is different. It... I’m looking for a way to get you back home.”

 

            She almost smiled. “I know, Connor,” she said quite gently. “You told me.”

 

            “Yeah, but... I’m getting somewhere, okay? I might have some preliminary results to show you in the New Year.” Connor cleared his throat. “I mean, just preliminary. But I’m getting an idea of where to look.”

 

            She frowned. “Where?”

 

            “Forest of Dean. I mean, that’s where we lost our Cutter and got your Ryan instead, isn’t it?” Connor shrugged. “It’s a hotspot for modern and Permian anomalies, if you look at the numbers. So that’s where I’ll start looking.”

 

            “Okay,” Lisa said, and then flashed Connor a smile. “Thanks, Conn. Happy Christmas.”

 

            She left the atrium, and maybe it was wishful thinking but Connor thought she walked a little taller than before. He crossed his legs and grinned. Two good deeds for the day: one, fixing the ADD, and two, wringing a real smile out of Lisa.

 

            Something fizzled sadly behind him, and the ADD beeped apologetically and went offline.

 

            Connor swore.

 

***

 

            The car journey down to the Forest of Dean was just as long and boring as Liz anticipated it would be. She was sitting in the front seat of Claudia’s little car as Claudia drove them down, Radio Four chattering softly in the companionable silence; Liz had been going to map-read, but Claudia had sat-nav, and in any case they were following Tom’s Jeep. There had been no room for either of them in there, since it was stuffed to the gills with bored and grumpy soldiers. Liz couldn’t bring herself to mind: she found Claudia quite good company.

 

            “You look happy,” Claudia observed. They were stuck on the M40, and it was only too clear that Claudia herself was not happy.

 

            Liz stared ahead into the back of the Jeep. Finn and Kermit appeared to be wrestling, which would have been fine, except that Blade was sitting between them in the back seat. “I’m good.”

 

            “You mean you’re well.” Claudia also looked into the back of the Jeep and flinched.  “Corporal Richards will knife one of them in a minute. Speaking of which, is he really giving you lessons?”

 

            “Now and then,” Liz said absently. “I’ve had worse teachers. And no, he won’t.”

 

            “Are you sure?”

 

            “Mostly,” Liz said. “How come Kermit’s there? He has a family, doesn’t he?”

 

            “He’s married,” Claudia confirmed. “They don’t have kids yet. He volunteered to stay behind so Adey could go and see his brother, who was on the wrong end of a gang shooting three weeks ago, if you remember.”

 

            Liz nodded, swallowing the vertigo from the comment about Kermit – she was used to the knee-jerk shock of remembering that Beth didn’t yet exist here – and taking the point about Adey. At the time, Adey’s comments on his brother’s street-sense and lack of any real means to defend himself against an idiot with a gun, the training methods of the Metropolitan police, and the uselessness of coppers in general had been loud, rambling, and profane. He was now swinging back and forth between anxiety for his brother and pride that the younger man had been given a commendation for the events that had wound up with him taking two bullets in the chest. “Kermit’s a softie.”

 

            Claudia smiled. “He is. Mind you, so is Adey.”

 

            “And by extension, so is Abby. Although I notice Abby is going off with Connor and Stephen.”

 

            Claudia snorted, indicated, and changed lane. “Explain that one, if you can.”

 

            “I can’t.” A flurry of rain hit the windscreen, and they caught each other’s eye and snickered quietly. Abby was the only one who seemed absolutely clear on what was going on between her and Adey; everyone else had no idea, and only Adey was taking that calmly. The ARC’s gossip machine had gone into improbable overdrive.

 

            “And don’t think I didn’t notice you changing the subject.”

 

            “Mm?”

 

            A couple of kids in a car too expensive for them to have bought themselves overtook, and Claudia muttered something under her breath as she retaliated, and then said aloud: “You’re feeling better. You look better. You act like you’re happier. It dates from about the day you went after those clones. Do you know Lyle says you probably saved his life?”

 

            Liz was silent for a moment. “He exaggerates. And Tom has already asked me this question.”

 

            “Has he? He didn’t tell me the answer.” The rain intensified, and Claudia slowed the car accordingly. In the Jeep ahead, Blade lost his temper and banged Finn and Kermit’s heads together. Both Claudia and Liz laughed.

 

            “The answer is... I feel in control again. Like I can deal with anything that comes after me.” Liz paused. “I feel safer like that. Like there is a way out, and I can find it, and if anything comes after me in the meantime, well, never mind. I can handle it.”

 

            “Doesn’t it bother you? That you killed at least two of them?”

 

            “You always call the clones ‘him’. ‘It’ is closer.” Liz shook her head. “I don’t know what Helen did to them. I don’t know who the – the original, I guess? – was. But they hardly ever speak and they don’t really think. The only thing they know is that they have to protect Helen, and they have to follow their orders. I remember Helen worried about one or two of the ones she was using when I was there, because they thought too much. She didn’t want to tell me so, but I could see her thinking it. They’re cannon fodder.” She sighed, and ran a hand through her hair. “I would mind more if I didn’t know that they want me dead. If I hadn’t spent months running away from them. And the odds have always been pretty fucking fair, Claudia – sorry, language, I know – but seriously: I’ve never faced them armed as heavily as they are. The first times I only had a knife. The last time, I had a knife and a gun. I’ve always been outnumbered, less well armed, or both. The fact that I survived is a miracle. Except I don’t believe in miracles.”

 

            “You think I haven’t noticed,” Claudia said, turning off the M40 with a sigh of relief, “but you still haven’t answered my question.”

 

            Liz stared into the backseat of the Jeep, which was now a total melee. They’d be lucky if the police didn’t pull them over. “What question?”

 

            “Does it bother you?”

 

            Liz didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Yeah,” she said at last. “Yeah, it does.” She glanced over at Claudia. “But I can still look myself in the eye without being ashamed of myself. I wonder how many travellers can do that?”

 

            “If Helen is representative,” Claudia said, not looking terribly reassured, “very few.”

 

            Liz smiled absently, and suddenly burst out laughing. “Look!”

 

            Claudia chuckled herself. The Jeep in front of them had pulled over onto the hard shoulder, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the shouting that would be going on. “Tell you what, Lisa. Get out the map, and let’s see if we can beat them there.”


	30. Chapter 30

            Those of the anomaly project who now took up residence at the Mitchells’ hotel for their shift were people who’d been there since the beginning, except Liz, and the Mitchells treated them all like family. They were cheerful, the kids especially so since they were on holiday and free for the time being, and Liz let their good spirits support hers. She didn’t feel especially optimistic, but she was happy enough, and she could face the prospect of a week at the Mitchells’ and then a few days at Tom’s grandmother’s with relative equanimity. She was a little nervous about it, and she knew that Christmas Day itself would be uncomfortable. She consoled herself that she wasn’t necessarily missing Christmas with her own family; she was just experiencing a regrettable temporal accident. Connor was looking for a way home, and he would find her one, however long it took.

 

            She missed Juliet particularly when she slept at the Mitchells’. Previously relegated to a single bed in a glorified cupboard, on account of the number of people who’d piled into the place, with fewer people there she rated a comfortable double bed. The empty space woke her several times in the night, disorientated by the fact that she knew, dimly, that it wasn’t a school night, and yet Juliet wasn’t there with her. A few moments later, she would realise she was neither in her own minimalist mess of a bedroom or in the fantasia in light purple that passed for Juliet’s, but the time in between was always confusing. She had not had the same problem at Claudia’s, probably because the walls were so thin, and when she woke it was generally because unfamiliar movement or voices, rather than the lack of familiar movement and voices, had disturbed her. She could not get used to knowing that she couldn’t just reach blindly out for Juliet and have her be there, or cast about for her phone and call the other girl. Perhaps because she had never met the shadow version of Juliet – might never even have known her, if Elizabeth had died aged only fourteen – it was harder to accept that she was not there, not as Liz had known her.

 

            Claudia and Tom appeared to be taking advantage of the fact that they didn’t have to get up until eight o’clock here, since work was quite literally on the floor below. Liz tried not to scowl too hard, since she didn’t really begrudge them their fun – particularly since they were quite a long way down the corridor and she didn’t hear a thing - and worked off her excess energy with vicious games of darts and some highly competitive snowball fighting, once the weather had gone from rain to snow. She nailed Finn in the face with a particularly good throw, and was strongly tempted to take a picture of his stunned, snow-encrusted face to take home, just to prove she’d done it.

 

            She followed the anomaly team’s normal routine, mostly. Abby, Connor and Stephen were all on holiday already, although they were within call if it became necessary, so Liz was the only one present who knew anything about the anomalies. She also knew how to take the readings Connor required; it wasn’t complicated but it had a bit of a knack to it, and Connor had taught very few people how, on the grounds that he was in the middle of other stuff and didn’t have much time to spare.  She therefore went out to about a third of the anomalies, which pretty much consisted of a daily round of all the ones that appeared regularly at about lunchtime, while the others checked them at night and in the early morning. It was all very basic and normal enough to be almost boring, except for eavesdropping on Claudia’s standing lunch appointment with her favourite local copper, which turned into a fantastic kvetching session about the uselessness of the general public in looking where they were going, exercising their common sense, and generally not behaving like a bunch of particularly suicidal sheep. Liz’s favourite story was the one about a bunch of lost Dutch students who had mistaken an anomaly for a tourist attraction, and had to be removed from the anomaly by a group of more switched-on locals, who hadn’t been able to resist filling their ears with a lot of nonsense about government conspiracies. Claudia said she had heard from a colleague at the Foreign Office about that one.

 

            They’d been there four out of five days, and there had only been one fresh anomaly. It had disgorged nothing more dangerous than an archaeopteryx, which had presented an interesting challenge in terms of catching it but had hardly stretched Claudia’s ingenuity in terms of a cover story (although Liz reserved judgement on whether or not there were fancy parrot breeders in the Forest of Dean area) and did nobody any harm, except for the gentleman who complained it had been mating with his doves, and they’d managed to disprove that one by showing that it couldn’t have got into the dovecote. Liz had blotted her copybook and acquired an official reprimand by wondering out loud and in the doves’ owner’s hearing what kind of compensation was due to someone whose doves had been fornicating with a tall brightly-feathered stranger, but at least she made everyone laugh, and Tom announced that that official reprimand was going to be printed out and pinned on the notice board reserved for similar gems and labelled ‘Stupid Shit We Have Done’. Liz found that curiously gratifying.

 

Out of respect for the Mitchells’ sensibilities and a superstitious wish not to jinx their Christmas, nobody remarked that it looked as if the anomalies had gone quiet for the festive season, but it certainly did look like that. Liz was hoping against hope for one more day of relative calm and no chasing toothful things around in the was-snow-now-sludge, and also for a white Christmas; part of her would have been happy to give up another anomaly or six and the chance of one that would take her home, but another part of her was desperate for each anomaly she visited – even the ones that were known quantities – to suddenly turn out to be the way home. Connor had said that the Forest of Dean was where he would start looking. Liz couldn’t help but feel that leaving it behind would mean leaving another chance of going home behind.

 

            She squelched that thought quite easily. She remembered thinking like that before when she was still stuck with Helen, and she had been wrong, hadn’t she?

 

            Juliet would have told her to be patient, and would probably have laughed at her while she said it. Liz smiled reflexively and turned over in her bed, ignoring the faint sliver of moonlight stealing through her curtains and closing her eyes, building a mirage, in her mind. Juliet in her yellow sundress in high summer, Juliet as Liz had left her behind.

 

            In her dreams the shouting and banging from outside was in Jon’s voice, and Liz stirred and woke abruptly to realise it was Tom, not her stepdad, calling her so emphatically. She slipped out of bed and wrenched the door open. “ _What_?”

 

            “Do you have to sleep like a fucking log? Anomaly. There’s another anomaly. Get dressed, Lewis, I want you downstairs in five minutes or less.”

 

            “Fine, fine,” Liz said, and banged the door in his face out of temper. Her dream of Juliet had dissipated the moment she’d realised that the yelling was real, not part of her dreams, and she was annoyed even though Tom couldn’t have known about it.

 

            She dressed quickly and in all her warmest clothes, knowing that it would be bloody cold out there – it was four-thirty in the morning, how could it be otherwise? – and slung her dinosaur bag over her shoulder, feeling the clink as the possessions inside shifted. She clattered downstairs and had a thermos of coffee stuffed into her hands, before being propelled out of the door and into Tom’s Jeep. There were lots of bright-eyed, offensively awake people in there, who had been on watch anyway and were enjoying the fact that they’d got to wake lots of people who otherwise would be snoozing blamelessly; Liz recognised that Tom was not one of them, and felt slightly less murderous towards him for waking her. She leaned into the side of the car, keeping a watchful eye on the passing scenery, and assimilated the information being poured into her ear by one of the soldiers she didn’t know, an enthusiast for Connor’s technology who never, ever shut up. She gathered that it was a strong anomaly, good for at least another three hours, in a new location, and that, if Connor’s distinctly wobbly extrapolations held good, it was modern.

 

            That woke Liz up. “ _Modern_!” she yelled, sitting bolt upright. “Tom - !”

 

            “Belt up,” Tom advised crossly, wincing; she was sitting right behind him and her voice had gone fairly high-pitched with excitement. “I heard too.” He twisted in his seat. “It could be the wrong timeline. It could be 1900, not 2000. Connor could be wrong about its being modern. Don’t get excited yet, Lisa.”

 

            Liz acknowledged the force of this, and slumped back into her seat. “Maybe we should wake up Claudia.”

 

            “No,” Tom said definitely. “It’s not even five o’clock. If it turns out to be the right anomaly, _you_ can wake Claudia.”

 

             “You’re more likely to get away with it than I am,” Liz argued, making an attempt at being persuasive, and succeeding in extracting a poorly-hidden snigger from the soldier next to her. She kicked him so Tom didn’t have to, and had the satisfaction of hearing him let out a small, sharp yelp. “Oi, you, watch it.”

 

            “Behave,” Tom said, and Kermit swung the Jeep right. It bumped over a cattle grid at exactly the wrong angle, making the people in it jerk like bobble-head dolls on the back seat of a car, and Kermit flicked up the headlights just in time to swerve to avoid a looming tree. A couple of minutes of driving later, they could see the eerie, halogen-white glow of the anomaly, and a minute or two after that, Kermit nudged the Jeep into reverse in case a quick exit became necessary, and they all piled out of the car.

 

            It was so cold, and so dark, the sky clear as crystal and filled with stars that looked like chips of ice. Liz had never seen so many, except when she was behind the anomalies; now she stared blindly up at them, trees charcoal-dark sticks looming in her sight, and gulped in deep breaths of freezing air and made herself be calm. She would be disappointed as hell if she was wrong, otherwise. At least, more disappointed than necessary.

 

            “Kermit. Fizz. Go and have a look.” Tom nodded at the men he’d named.

 

            Liz watched them walk through, kicking her heels in the leaves and sludge and twitching with impatience. She normally had to wait, since she was a civilian, but it had never bothered her as much as it did tonight.

 

            “Stop that,” Tom said mildly, much to the amusement of Connor’s biggest fan.

 

            Liz came to an abrupt halt. Her fingers were shaking in her gloves even though she wasn’t cold, and she waited, silent and tense.

 

            Fizz burst back through the anomaly, bright-eyed; Kermit followed behind, looking vaguely as if he’d seen a ghost.

 

            “It’s not...” Liz breathed involuntarily, heart hammering. “It _can’t_ be.” Don’t get your hopes up, she told herself over and over again. Don’t. You know how much it will hurt when you’re wrong.

 

            Tom glanced at her and snapped at the men to report. Kermit swayed slightly where he stood, looking as if he might sit down in the mess that was the forest floor and have done with it, but Fizz answered. “It is modern, boss. There’s a couple of others on the other side like us, just like us – like Kermit and Ditzy. We asked them what year it was and they said 2009, and they asked us if we’d seen a girl called Liz - !”

 

            “And naturally you answered ‘no, but we know a Lisa’,” Tom said dryly. He found the fact that people often slipped and called Liz by her real name significantly more amusing than Claudia did. He looked at Liz and nodded. “Better take a look. Want me to come with you?”

 

            “You might make them faint,” Liz said. “They think you’re dead, remember?” She grinned, exhilarated. “On second thoughts, yeah, definitely, that’s a good way to check if it’s my timeline.”

           

            He flicked an eyebrow at her, but didn’t hide his own smile, and Liz ran ahead of him through the anomaly and stopped dead, feeling as if she’d run into a heater.

 

            “Fuck, it’s hot,” she said, surprised, and ripped her beanie, gloves and scarf off.

 

            The Kermit in this timeline also looked as if he were going to pass out, and the Ditzy looked torn between delight, fear and confusion. “Liz? Boss?”

 

            “It’s me, it’s definitely me,” Liz said hurriedly, words chattering out between her teeth as she pulled off Claudia’s coat and her heavy jumper. It must still be summer. “Ditzy, who am I, what happened to me, and why?”  


            Ditzy gave her an uncertain look, a break from staring at Tom.

 

            “Just answer her, Dave,” Tom said, with a rather bittersweet smile on his face.

 

            “You’re Liz Lester,” Ditzy said slowly, “you were kidnapped by Helen three weeks ago, we’ve been looking for you... Tom, is that -”

 

            “Yes,” Tom said.

 

            Liz yanked at his sleeve and dodged the swing of his hand easily. “Tom, we have to tell Claudia, this anomaly is good for – an hour, maybe –”

 

            He looked down at her, finally, and nodded. “We’ll call her. Bye, Dave. Look after yourself.” Then he turned, and went back through the anomaly.

 

            “ _Claudia_?” Ditzy exclaimed, stunned. “Not Claudia fucking Brown!”

 

            “So Cutter isn’t nuts! I know! Who knew? Give me a minute!”

 

             She dashed through the anomaly, colliding with Tom’s broad back and dropping several of the things she was carrying. She bent and picked them up, shivering as the wind caught her, and realised that Tom was already on the phone to Claudia.

 

            “... I know... I know. Yes. No.” He cast a strangely affectionate glance down at Liz. “No. There’s no stopping her. Do you want to-? I’ll pass you over.”

 

            Liz took the phone from him and wedged it between her shoulder and her ear. “Claudia! We found it! We definitely found it! I can go home!”

 

            Claudia laughed at her, but it sounded a little sad. “I know. How’s that for a Christmas present?”

 

            Liz beamed. “ _Best ever_. Look, Claudia – thanks – seriously, thanks for everything. Sir James would’ve banged me up in jail if he could. Or, I don’t know. Hidden me away. You stopped him, I know that. Thank you.”

 

            “It was the right thing to do,” Claudia said gently, but Liz could hear she was pleased. “I’m just glad you get to do this, Liz. Go on. Go home. And tell Tom to come back soon, because I am getting _cold_.”

 

            Liz yelped. “Tell him yourself! Jesus, woman. But – thank you. Thank you again.”

 

            “You’re welcome,” Claudia said, and sighed. “Goodbye, Liz.”

 

            “Hey - you just called me by my real name.”

 

            “I did.”

 

            “Thanks,” Liz said quietly, surprised and rather touched. She had managed to pick up the information that Claudia didn’t like the thought of an alternate timeline, knowing that was probably where Tom had come from, and not wanting to lose him. She gave the phone back to Tom, and carried the extra clothes she’d taken off back to the Jeep. The coat and scarf were Claudia’s; so were the gloves. These, she left on the back seat of the Jeep, yanking the beanie back over her head and stuffing the heavy jersey she was wearing into her dinosaur bag, which she pulled over her shoulder. It contained all the things she’d want to take with her when she left – including the original black box. They had a copy left at the hotel, in Ross Jenkins’ sticky little paws. And much as Sir James might object when he knew she’d taken it, it was hers by right: after all, she was the one who’d stolen it in the first place. She had her knife, and her souvenirs from the future. She took out the book she’d borrowed from Tom and the office phone and left those behind, too, on top of the pile of warm clothes.

 

            That was it. That was everything.

 

            She tapped Kermit on the shoulder as she headed back to the anomaly. “Hey. Thanks for the driving lessons.”

 

            He grinned at her. “You’re welcome.”  


            “Tell Blade and Abby thanks, too. I – yeah.” She grinned back, and then jabbed Tom in the ribs. He was still talking to Claudia, and paying no attention to her.

 

            “What now?” he demanded, taking the phone away from his ear.

 

            “I’m going,” she said, and managed a shaky, astonished smile. “No time like the present, right?”

 

            “Right,” Tom said, and surprised her by hugging her. “Go on. Got everything?” He waited for her to nod. “Off with you. And take better care of yourself in future.”

 

            “I will,” she grinned, and disappeared through the anomaly at a run.

 

            The Ditzy and Kermit from her timeline were still there when she made it through, looking at her saucer-eyed. It was still really hot. She took her beanie off and rolled up the sleeves of her jumper.

 

            “Darren,” Ditzy said deliberately. “Remind me to check the water. And call for back-up. You and I are having some seriously fucking weird hallucinations.”

 

            Liz broke out into a giggle, and clapped her hand over her mouth. Delighted laughter bubbled up within her. “You’re not hallucinating. You’re _not_. It’s me. I did it. I’m _home_.”


	31. Chapter 31

            When Tom slid back into bed the sky was slowly lightening, and Claudia was awake, lying on her side with her eyes open.

           

            “She’s gone,” he whispered, drawing Claudia in against him. “I checked on the other side. It was her home timeline, and Ditzy and Kermit were there. The anomaly’s closed again, and she didn’t come back through. Fiver stuck his head through to check. She’s fine.”

 

            She turned in his arms, snuggling against his chest. It was dark in their room, the curtains closed, but he could just about make out the bright spark of her eyes, and the expression on her face. This time, she wasn’t worried that he might have liked to go with Liz, to go back to the timeline he’d been born in. At least, he didn’t think she was. “She was happy?”

 

            “Thrilled.” He kissed her gently, and nuzzled his face against hers. Claudia half-smiled, and unaccountably failed to make her usual complaints about the fact that he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and his stubble was scraping her skin.

 

            There was a small, hesitant silence. “I would have liked to keep her.”

 

            “I know, love. Easy to get attached.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe we should talk about kids again. If we can handle a demented teenager like that...”

 

            She snorted sleepily, and poked him in the stomach. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Captain Ryan. You haven’t even asked me to marry you yet.”

 

            “That,” he murmured into her hair, “could change,” and followed her down into a few more hours’ sleep, before the hotel woke.

 

           

            Claudia called Sir James the next morning, while Tom was simultaneously letting the Mitchells know about Liz’s departure and finding her breakfast in bed. Sir James picked up the phone with more than usual irritability, which was actually quite reasonable, given that he was on holiday.

           

            “I just thought you might like to know,” she said evenly, when she could get a word in edgeways, “that we found Liz an anomaly home.”

 

            There was silence on the other end of the line.

 

            “She went through at five a.m. It closed at six-thirty.”

           

            “Pity,” Sir James said, with slightly less than his usual coolness. “One got used to having her around the place.” He paused. “But I suppose she was pleased.”

 

            “She told me it was the best Christmas present ever,” Claudia said. “So I suppose she was.”

 

            There was another, longer pause. “Did she leave a message?”

 

            Claudia hesitated. She could lie and make him feel better, or she could tell the truth and... tell the truth and what? She didn’t know. She thought for a moment, and then decided that while Sir James was a great man, he did occasionally need reminding to be a good one, and his fifteen-year-old son was not there to operate as his conscience. “She left a few, sir. For her friends.”

 

            “I see.” He sounded only slightly shaken. Claudia was strongly of the opinion that, since he was the one who had assumed Liz to be a liar in Helen’s pay, he deserved to be mildly distressed – and she was sure he would get over it before Christmas Day. “Well. Have a good holiday, Miss Brown.”

 

            “You too, Sir James,” she said, and put the phone down.

             

 

            Kermit put the call through to Abby at noon, correctly reasoning that neither she, nor Connor, nor Stephen would be awake before then. It took him a couple of goes; they were at the cottage in Scotland that had once belonged to Nick, and had passed to Stephen in his will, and the mobile signal was notoriously crap. Lester, who was for these purposes designated as Scrooge, complained that Abby, Connor and Stephen only took their holidays there because it was an almost-guaranteed Lester-free zone.

 

            “Hello?” Abby said, picking up the phone, and immediately shouted: “Boys! Stop that! _Connor_! God, it’s like living in a madhouse. Hello? Is anyone there?”

 

            “Yes,” Kermit said, only a little startled; he was used to the trio’s odd way of conducting themselves. “’S me, Kermit.”

 

            “Oh, hi,” Abby said. “Please tell me Lester doesn’t want us to come back into work. We’re snowed in.”

 

            He laughed. “Nah, you’re fine. It’s Lisa.”

 

            “Lisa? What about her?”

 

            “We found her an anomaly home and she went through, early this morning. She said to say thanks for the lessons.”

 

            “That was sweet of her,” Abby said, sounding genuinely touched. “I hope Claudia and Captain Ryan are okay – they were getting a bit attached to her, weren’t they?”

 

            Kermit glanced at the ceiling. “Yeah, well. We haven’t seen them yet this morning, so we reckon they’re probably okay.”

 

            Abby’s laughter echoed down the phone line; Kermit said the polite things, and ended the call. He looked over at Blade, who reached out for the mobile and made an imperative give-me gesture.

 

            “Let me call Cara first,” Kermit said.

 

            Blade rolled his eyes and gave in. “Fine. But let me have it afterwards, OK?”

 

            Kermit nodded, and started to wander out of the room.

 

            “She was all right,” Blade said behind him.

 

            “Huh?” Kermit said, stopping.

 

            “Lisa. Liz.”

 

            Kermit half-smiled. “Yeah. She was all right.”

 

***

 

            “First things first,” Liz said, on the right side of the anomalies at last and buzzing with it. “What’s the date?”

 

            “The first of August, 2009,” Ditzy answered, looking as if he was slowly inching himself back towards sanity. “You’ve been gone three weeks today.”

 

            Liz stared at him. “Shit. Really?”

 

            Ditzy nodded.

 

            “I was gone about six months,” Liz said, stunned. “I mean, it was six months for me. Huh.” She fell silent, then briskly went back to the next question. “Two: where am I?”

 

            “Forest of Dean.”

 

            “Right. Right.” Liz looked around. She recognised where she was: pretty much the exact same spot she’d been in on the other side of the anomalies, just in a different timeline, and also a different month. “I’m guessing the ARC is based at the Mitchells’ hotel? Yes? Okay, look, Ditzy, if this is as much of a shock for you as that, just nod. Kermit, sit down and put your head between your knees, you seriously look like you’re about to faint.”

 

            Ditzy nodded, and then added: “But how do you know about that?”

 

            “It’s the same in the other timeline.” Liz fished for her wallet, and took out the ARC pass Claudia had given her in the name of Lisa Lewis. “I worked for the project for a couple of months. Once I got shot of Helen and – okay, look, it’s a long story, I have other things on my mind. Where are my parents?”

 

            “Your dad and Jon are in London.” Ditzy reached for his radio. “We could call them – you have no idea how worried they’ve been –”

 

            “I kind of do,” Liz said. “Sort of. Don’t call them.” She shook her head and grinned. “I came this far on my own. I want to do the rest of it myself too. Can I borrow the Jeep?”

 

            “You can’t drive!” Ditzy yelped. Liz knew for a fact that he knew this was not the case; Jon had started teaching her on private land when she was fifteen, and she’d been quite a competent driver even before the Kermit in the other timeline had got to teaching her.

 

            “I can so,” Liz said.

 

            “You’re sixteen! You haven’t got a licence!”

 

            “Actually,” Liz said, grinning smugly, and retrieved the other piece of ID Claudia had mysteriously produced for her in the name of Lisa Lewis, DOB 12/08/89, twenty years of age in less than two weeks. It was a driving licence.

 

            Ditzy boggled at it for a minute, and then shook his head. He was half-grinning, although it apparently went against the grain. “You bastard. You’ve got everything covered, haven’t you?”

 

            “Everything but car keys,” Liz said, grinning at him.

 

            “You get the car keys,” Ditzy assured her. “On one condition. Lacey and Finn are coming to relieve us in ten minutes. You take Lacey with you. If nothing else, that’ll cover my arse when Jon wants to know why I let his stepdaughter gallivant around the UK on her own.”

 

            “Believe me,” Liz said happily, “I have been gallivanting a _lot_ further than that.”

 

            “I believe you,” Ditzy said, and his expression was suddenly serious.

 

            Liz turned away from it. She’d lived through some shitty experiences behind the anomalies, she knew that, and she knew that she would have to deal with it. But now really wasn’t the time to think about that. The key point was that she was nearly home.

 

            She wondered if Lacey would kick up a fuss about having to let her drive.

 

***

 

            Lacey did not kick up a fuss, and – thank God – she didn’t ask too many questions. She sat in the passenger seat watching Liz carefully, and fingering the driver’s licence and ARC pass Claudia had produced. She had been visibly pleased to see Liz, and had said lots of things about beating the odds and Barratt owing her fifty quid, and then she’d moved to hug Liz, and Liz knew she had tensed up in the hug. She hadn’t meant to do it, she just had, and Lacey had given her one long look and eased off. Fewer questions. Less talking.

 

            Liz was unspeakably relieved. She needed to concentrate on her driving; it was a fine day, unlike most of the weather she’d driven through for Claudia and the others, but she hadn’t done a lot on motorways. The traffic was reasonable, which was good, and the excitement of being home was still bubbling under, buoying her up. She didn’t need to think about the hard questions people like Tanya would be asking her quite soon, even if they worried her a little.

 

            “You did bloody well, you know,” Lacey said, breaking the silence on the outskirts of London. “Surviving.”

 

            Liz slowed as they entered the heavier stream of traffic on the main arterial roads towards the centre. “Hundreds of other people have done it. There are quite a lot of travellers.”

 

            “And how many of them are sixteen? And how many of them ever make it home?”

 

            “Technically I think I’m seventeen,” Liz said, dodging the last question and braking sharply for an ill-advised pedestrian. “At least once over. Maybe twice.” She snickered. “Does that make me nineteen? And twenty in two weeks’ time?”

 

            “Doesn’t matter how old you are,” Lacey said faux-sweetly, “you’ll still always be the kid who pitched herself into a river to escape a dinosaur to me.”

 

            Liz groaned. “God, do you have to? You’re literally worse than my dad.”

 

            “Looking forward to seeing him?”

 

            “You have no idea.” Liz sighed, and took the road for the ARC in Claudia’s time, hoping the route to this timeline’s ARC would be the same. She had never visited the latter as a driver. “Reckon we can get in without him realising?”

 

            “Let’s see who’s on guard duty at the car park. But I reckon so, yeah. You want to surprise him that much?”

 

            Liz’s lips curved in an involuntary smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. Unless you think it’ll give him a heart attack.”

 

            “At this late date I shouldn’t think anything you could do would give him a heart attack.”

 

 

            It turned out to be Blade at the car park, which was good, because Blade a) knew Liz and b) was perfectly capable of keeping his mouth shut for half an hour, but he did, unfortunately, pull a knife on her when he failed to recognise her and she passed him a card he must have assumed was fake.

 

            “Knock it off, Blade,” Lacey said, having hysterics in the passenger seat. “Can’t you see who it is?”

 

            Liz turned so she was looking him full in the eyes, and had the satisfaction of seeing his jaw drop.

 

            “Bloody fucking hell,” he breathed. “I never thought you’d do it.”

 

            “Oh, thanks,” Liz huffed, a small giggle slipping out. “Now there’s confidence in my abilities.”

 

            Blade put the knife away and grinned lopsidedly, shaking his head. “Go on. In with you. I’ll call Lorraine and get her to clear your dad’s schedule.”

 

            “Thanks,” Liz said. “But don’t let her tell him.”

 

            “I won’t,” Blade said, and made a businesslike flapping motion with one hand. “Get a move on. The sooner you stop being missing, the better Lyle’s mood will be, and frankly he’s been a fucking nightmare, so get on with it, will you?”

 

            Liz laughed, and slid the car down into the car park. Tanya directed her to one of the spaces reserved for the ARC’s Special Forces contingent, and remarked that Blade seemed to like her.

 

            “Is that meant to be a compliment?” Liz demanded, edging towards the parking space with her neck cricked round to see where she was going.

 

            “He doesn’t like most people!”

 

            “True.” Liz put the car into first gear and swung it forward to straighten it up a bit. “He likes me because I get on with his girlfriend. I don’t think Lorraine has a lot of close friends, she’s not good at them, but I make a point of being nice to her because she’s nice, and also because her being nice to my dad materially improves his work day. He always comes home looking like he’s been through a mangle when she disapproves of something he does. Now shut up, because I find this bit really difficult...”

 

            She parked the Jeep without mishap, and climbed out and walked through the ARC with Lacey. She’d been here only once or twice before, and both times it was in emergencies when she’d really been thinking of something else, so Lacey’s guidance was invaluable, but with the dinosaur bag and the ARC pass clipped to the lower edge of her shirt she looked like a perfectly average member of staff, and not even the staff members she knew well would have known her with her heavy tan, cropped hair, different clothes, and entirely different way of movement. Lacey being with her just added to her authenticity, and helped stop her being recognised as Liz Lester before she wanted to be.

 

            Shortly before they reached the atrium, Lacey stopped. “OK. It’s just straight on here then up the ramp once you get into the drum, you won’t be able to miss it, it’s all glass walls but he’ll probably be working too hard to notice you. Do you want me to go and tell Lyle he needs to be upstairs?”

 

            Liz considered this for a second. “Yeah, why not? But same as before, don’t tell him it’s because of me.”

 

            Lacey nodded, although there was a slightly dubious expression on her face, as though she wasn’t sure she would get away with it, and turned off down a smaller corridor. Liz kept going, making her way along the corridor at a brisk walk. Her heart was pounding, and it was almost impossible to keep herself from breaking into a run. She burst into the atrium, and headed directly for the ramp; no-one gave her a second glance, least of all the disgruntled-looking duty technician on the ADD. It took mere moments to get up to the two large offices up there, one much more cluttered and with more people in than the other. Not wanting to disturb Jenny Lewis, who was in any case on the phone and typing with one hand at the same time, she just caught Miss Wickes’ eye.

 

            Miss Wickes smiled, and pressed the intercom on her desk. “James. Your three-thirty appointment is here.”

 

            Liz vanished out of the doorway, and a familiar peevish voice was saying “I don’t _have_ a three-thirty appointment,” and then she was at the door and pushing it open.

 

            “Yes you do,” she said. “I’m three weeks late, or so I’m told. But I got here in the end.”

 

            There was a moment of perfect silence and stillness.

 

            “ _Liz_ ,” James Lester said, and bolted from behind his desk to wrap his arms around his daughter and pretend not to cry, and Liz hugged him back, her own eyes brightening, and buried her face in the shoulder of one of his favourite suits.

 

            “I came back,” she was saying without really knowing what she was saying, “I came back, I knew I could, but it took me fucking ages, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I love you, Dad, _I came back_ –”

           

            Faintly she heard familiar, heavy footsteps, and then their owner broke into a run and shoved open the door, and Lester said “Jon, she did it, she’s _home_ ,” and then Jon Lyle grabbed both of them, and Liz was pretty much squashed, and she didn’t know if she was laughing or crying but if she was honest, if she told the _absolute truth_ , she really didn’t care.

 

 

            There was just one thing left to do. Just one person she needed to see, needed with her right now, who needed to know that she had made it home alive and mostly unscathed, and Liz knew just where to find her.

 

            She wouldn’t let her dad and Jon take her home, not yet, and when she explained to them what she wanted they were reasonably happy to go along with it; they knew how much it mattered to her. Lester took the rest of the day off, let Jenny in on the news – Liz drowned in her congratulations for a moment, before letting Miss Wickes draw her pragmatically off to one side and feed her coffee and biscuits before she collapsed, since she hadn’t had a meal since the previous night – and got his official driver to take him home, while Jon borrowed the Merc and drove Liz, who was thankful to think she wouldn’t have to try to handle her father’s automobile baby. Both the other Kermit and Jon’s lessons had tended towards the ‘what to do when driving under fire’ rather than ‘how to handle large and expensive cars’ end of the spectrum. Lester even promised to keep Kathy away until Liz was safely home and had sorted out all the personal stuff. Liz did not feel equal to discussing her disappearance with her mother and youngest brother until she had tracked down her girlfriend, had a meal, and possibly slept for an hour or six.

 

            The ballet studio looked gorgeous in the August sunshine behind the avenue of trees shielding the quiet road - modern but a couple of years old, its white paint unharmed and the glass doors still immaculate, but its wood weathered grey. Juliet always came here in the holidays to use the space to practise. Unless she’d changed her habits completely, and Juliet was a creature of habit, she’d be here.

 

            Jon drew into a parking space. “Go on. She’s been miserable without you.”

 

            “I’ve been miserable without her,” Liz muttered, and glanced over at him. “Thanks for this, Jon.”  


            He smiled. “No problem.”

 

            She wasn’t really there to hear him; she had jumped out of the car and headed straight for the studio. She pushed open the glass door and went to the receptionist. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Juliet Sayers – she’s a ballet dancer, used to take lessons here, about yea high, blonde?...”

 

            “She’s in Practice Room Three,” the receptionist said, and gave Liz directions.

 

            She followed them, and a matter of moments later found herself at the door of the practice studio, faint classical music wafting out from it even through the thick door. Through the glass pane set in the door she could see the waist-height wooden barre, the scarred pine floor, the mirror wall.

 

            The door swung noiselessly on its hinges, and Liz made an effort to step inside as quietly. The slender blonde girl dancing in the centre of the room barely noticed her against the swell of the music and the hard tap of her pointe shoes on the floor, and she watched for a moment, dry-mouthed and mesmerised by the effortless, expressive beauty of her movements.

 

            “Juliet,” she said, and it came out as a croak; she tried again, louder. “Ju.”

 

            Juliet fell out of her arabesque and twisted sharply, staring at Liz as if she could not believe she was there. It was hot in the studio; she had sweated through her soft grey shirt, her porcelain skin was flushed and had a faint sheen of perspiration, and her hair was falling out of her loose bun in strands.

 

            Liz smiled, but it was weak, and she took a step forward. “Sorry,” she said, and her voice wobbled. “I’m kind of late.”

 

            Juliet ran across the studio as if her pointe shoes had wings as well as ribbons, and flung herself at Liz, and Liz caught her; and with Juliet in her arms, the world finally clicked back into place, and Liz let out one long breath of relief.

 

            “You came back,” Juliet sobbed, “you _came back_ ,” and Liz thought memory had exaggerated how much she liked kissing Juliet, but no, apparently not.

 

            “I did,” she said, and tears squeezed from the edges of her eyes; she’d never cried because she was happy before but she was now, drunk on it, feeling like she could fly because of it. “I promise you, Ju. I’ll _always_ come back.”

 


End file.
